
Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia, curated by Tarek Abou El Fetouh features ten works by Abdullah Al Saadi and offers a reflection on his decades-long artistic practice. Expanding on the work initially presented in the UAE National Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia in 2024, the exhibition is designed to show the prolific artist’s work in the UAE, giving the local arts community and the wider audiences across the country the opportunity to encounter Al Saadi’s practice more intimately.
In his practice, Al Saadi embodies a wanderer, chronicler, cartographer, poet, decipherer, memory carrier, and storyteller. This exhibition includes works that were produced on his journeys in the wilderness, and invites viewers to explore his creative process in relation to the practices of Arab poets from centuries ago.
During his journeys that last several days, Al Saadi begins drawing, painting, or writing, on canvas or paper, once he feels immersed in nature. Classical Arab poets described this practice of wandering and immersion as the process leading up to the composition of their poems. He travels alone, with only the company of a book, music, domestic animals, or a means of transportation. The presence of these travel companions significantly impacts his artworks, as they join him in exploring the land and humankind’s place in it.
The presence of nature in Al Saadi’s work is not intended for visual documentation, and his map-like drawings and paintings do not include all the spatial components of the landscapes he depicts, the mountains, deserts and valleys. He creates a subjective, imagined world in the folds of nature, which does not exclude elements of contemporary life. He chooses the sites to retain, and others to forget, in a creative process that is simultaneously intellectual and aesthetic, sensorial and affective. Sites of memory are essentially paired with sites of amnesia, both necessary to the formation process of individual and collective memory, representing parallel histories alongside officially documented ones. For over forty years, Al Saadi has been creating singularly subjective narratives, and through a process of assiduous archiving, he keeps his maps, stones, scrolls, and drawings in tin boxes of various shapes and sizes. They are all stored in big metal chests like treasure boxes, numbered, dated, and coded, as if he is creating and preserving a collective memory for the future.
The exhibition is an invitation to enter Abdullah Al Saadi’s singular world and to wander among its unique and rich features. This is a journey where visitors move along a path, discovering both the displayed artworks and hidden art pieces in metal chests. In a re-enactment of the artist’s ritual with visitors in his studio, the concealed works are revealed by performers, who are constantly present in the space. They interact with visitors, telling them stories and giving them clues about the artist’s journeys and the collective memory that Al Saadi summons into the present, and meticulously preserves for the future.
View and download the children's In-Gallery Activity Guide here.
For school visits, please note that tours can be arranged on request. Kindly email hello@421.online for further assistance.
To download and view the exhibition press kit, please visit this link.
About the artist
Abdullah Al Saadi is an Emirati artist who lives and works in Khor Fakkan and is one of the “Pioneer Five” conceptual artists, who, in the 1980s, bolstered the contemporary art scene in the UAE and influenced a generation of artists in the region. He studied English literature at the United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, before studying Japanese painting at Kyoto Seika University in Japan from 1994 to 1996. Al Saadi’s work ranges from painting and drawing, the creation of lengthy artists’ notebooks to the collection and systematic categorisation of found objects, and the invention of new alphabets. A great affinity with nature and rural life informs the artist’s practice, which explores local environments as well as intersections of personal and cultural history.
His latest exhibition Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia, took place in 2024 at the National Pavilion UAE at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. In 2021, his work Terhal was included in the permanent Public Art Programme of Expo 2020 Dubai. He also participated in a number of group and solo exhibitions, including the Sharjah Biennial 12 & 13 (2015, 2017); the 54th and 56th International Art Exhibitions of La Biennale di Venezia (2011, 2015); Here and Elsewhere, New Museum, New York (2014); Al-Toubay, Sharjah Art Foundation (2014); Emirati Expressions: Realised, Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi (2013); Languages of the Desert, Kunstmuseum Bonn, (2005); the São Paulo Biennial (2004); and The Art of the Five from the United Arab Emirates, Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen, Germany (2002).
About the curator
Tarek Abou El Fetouh is an independent curator who lives and works in Brussels. His previous curatorial projects include A Shadow of A Shadow, a solo exhibition for William Kentridge with the Sharjah Art Foundation (2024), Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia at the National Pavilion UAE at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2024), the Public Art Programme for Expo 2020 in Dubai (2019–2021), Durub Al Tawaya, an annual performance event at Abu Dhabi Art (2013–2018); Rituals of Signs and Metamorphoses (2018) and Captive of Love (2017) at Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing; The Time Is Out of Joint, Sharjah Art Foundation and Asian Culture Complex - Asian Arts Theatre, Gwangju (2016); Lest the Two Seas Meet, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2015); Home Works 6, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2013); Sharjah Biennial 9 (2009); Roaming Inner Landscapes, Bibliotheca Alexandrina and Garage Theatre, Alexandria (2004); Windows, a multidisciplinary festival of contemporary arts, Minya and Cairo (2004); DisORIENTation, House of World Cultures, Berlin (2003) and It’s Happening in the Garage, Jesuits Cultural Center, Alexandria (2000).
Abou El Fetouh worked as Senior Curator and Director of the Performance Department at Sharjah Art Foundation from 2021 to 2024. He established innovative initiatives in the Arab world and has sought to develop conversations among practitioners both regionally and internationally. Abou El Fetouh is the founder of the Young Arab Theatre Fund (YATF), renamed Mophradat since 2015, which is a Brussels-based foundation working in the field of contemporary visual and performance arts. In 2003, he initiated the Meeting Points Festival of Contemporary Arts and curated the first four editions of the festival (MP 1–4), which took place in several cities in the Arab world. He served as the artistic director of MP7 with the Zagreb-based collective WHW (2013–2014), MP6 with curator Okwui Enwezor (2011–2012) and MP5 with curator Frie Leysen (2007–2008).