Art Jameel, an independent organisation that supports artists and creative communities, announces a major new group exhibition titled We saw an endless cycle (November 27, 2024 – April 17, 2025), taking place across Hayy Arts’ two floors in Hayy Jameel, Jeddah’s home for the arts. The exhibition speaks to the ways in which artists bear witness to the city through intimate gestures, presenting contemporary artworks, archival materials, works from the Art Jameel Collection, new commissions and loans.
Set against the backdrop of Jeddah – a cosmopolitan port-city with its storied history of transformation – the exhibition echoes the recurring impulse to contend with the dynamism, contradictions and politics of the urban sphere, reflecting on the evolving methods and motifs found in visual and performative practices like walking and crawling, and acts of recording and reinterpretation through photographing, painting, drawing, writing, sculpting and processes of counter-mapping. Through personal and sometimes disruptive practices , artists on view engage deeply with the city.
Curated by Art Jameel’s Rotana Shaker, We saw an endless cycle features 17 local and international artists from 12 countries, some of whom are showing in Saudi Arabia for the first time, including: Lubna Chowdhary, Basmah Felemban, Mustafa Hassan, Bricklab, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Amal Kenawy, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Umber Majeed, William Pope.L, Abdulhalim Radwi, Seher Shah, Hassan Sharif, John Smith, Mohammed Al Saleem, Dima Srouji, Risham Syed, Lin Yilin and Lulua Alyahya. ‘We saw an endless cycle’ takes its title from poetry by exhibiting artist Seher Shah and presents a diverse array of artists who offer non-exhaustive windows into the various scales of our understanding and relation to the city, from the collective imagination of a modern metropolis and the transformation of the horizon into the iconic cityscape, to the embodied experiences of the individual attempting to navigate and grasp within it. The artists presented here document and reinterpret urban sites across the globe including the nighttime pavements of London; the crowded streets of Guangzhou, Cairo and New York; the evolving maps of Jerusalem and Jeddah; the etched walls of Tunis, new-builds of Lahore and Islamabad and the imagined amalgamations of cities like them.
Press release from Art Jameel
Image: Umber Majeed. Memories fade…Photographs shouldn’t. 2016. Video installation. Image courtesy of the artist
