As a physician turned artist, Ahmed Mater makes prognoses as part of his everyday medical practice, to make predictions on the cause of an alignment or disease related to the human body. As an artist he applies the same analogy to exploring the fast evolving cultural and spatial topography of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In this context, the exhibition Prognosis presents an artistic set of predictions, drawn from primary and secondary sources, to poetically reflect upon a period of history on and about the Kingdom spanning 1979-2019. Guided by the conceptual themes of Coding, Proxies, Surveillance and Whistleblowing, the exhibition's design relies on several overlapping of ideas, which are deployed via drawing, ephemera, film and video, installation, painting and photography, and provide an astute commentary on life in the Kingdom from a 21st century standpoint.
By Sara Raza
