Ithra’s Art Collection at Art Week Riyadh: Memory, Landscape, and the Art of Connection
At this year’s Art Week Riyadh, the King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture (Ithra) presents Landscape and Memory—a curated selection of 15 artworks that explore how memory takes form through material, place, and time. At Art Week Riyadh, Ithra presents a curated selection of 15 significant works from its museum collection, titled Landscape and Memory, as part of the event’s invited collections exhibition, under the title of Collections in Dialogue, at JAX District, from 6 April – 31 May 2025. Spanning from the early 1900s to 2022, the display showcases a rich variety of artistic practices and cultural expressions.
The works span over a century, from early 20th-century pieces to commissions from 2022, bringing together a diverse range of practices. Each piece speaks to the relationship between landscape and identity, whether through architectural impressions, cultural artefacts, or abstract forms. Rather than presenting history as something fixed, Landscape and Memory explored it as something living, shifting, and deeply human. Some artists worked directly with that sense of physical memory. Do Ho Suh captured the emotional weight of architectural spaces — homes, hallways, thresholds — prompting us to question where memory ends and structure begins.
Abdul Rahman Katanani twisted barbed wire into spirals of survival, transforming symbols of trauma into emblems of endurance.
Others reflected on how memory is shaped by what we see — and what we choose to forget. Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mirror works turned the viewer into a participant, layering past and present in each reflection.
Joumana Medlej’s intricate paper compositions faded and resurfaced like memories themselves — delicate, persistent, half-remembered.
And Sultan bin Fahad transformed archival images into glowing relics, anchoring the exhibition in both nostalgia and critique.
The collection didn’t merely reflect the past — it animated it. From Maha Malluh’s stacked oil barrels to Gregory Mahoney’s oxidised surfaces, the works suggested that memory erodes, reforms, and sometimes resists.
They asked: how do we carry place with us? What do we choose to preserve? By positioning these works in conversation — across time, geography, and form — Ithra invited viewers to move through memory like a landscape. Not as passive observers, but as active participants in a shared, ever-evolving story.
About the Ithra Museum
As the heart of Ithra’s cultural mission, the Ithra Museum brings together Saudi and global perspectives through a dynamic programme of exhibitions, commissions, and acquisitions. Its five permanent galleries span contemporary art, Islamic heritage, natural history, archival treasures, and Saudi material culture—each space offering a distinct lens on how art shapes knowledge and identity.
From large-scale exhibitions like Hijrah: In the Footsteps of the Prophet and The Art of Orientation, to the current Year of the Artisan series, Ithra continues to support dialogue between tradition and experimentation. With Landscape and Memory, the museum extends its vision to Art Week Riyadh, contributing not just a collection, but a conversation between past and present, local and global, memory and landscape.