Amal Al Ali on Ahaad Alamoudi’s vibrant meditations on memory, development and Khaleeji visual culture.
09 April 2026
In ‘Sunkissed’ at Sharjah Art Foundation, Jeddah-based artist Ahaad Alamoudi threads humour, pop-cultural immediacy, and symbolic resonance into a compelling reflection on repetition, fatigue, and transformation in the Gulf. Bringing together newly commissioned and recent works, the exhibition probes how icons, technologies and gestures accrue meaning within landscapes marked by accelerated change. Curator Amal Al Ali speaks to ART AFRICA on framing recurrence as both an aesthetic strategy and a cultural condition, and about situating Alamoudi’s evolving practice within longer arcs of collective memory.
Ahaad Alamoudi, Let’s not twist and turn (detail), 2025. Supported by Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Motaz Mawid.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: ‘Sunkissed’ gathers newly commissioned and recent works into a tightly considered constellation. How did you conceptualise the exhibition’s central inquiry into the intersection of collective identity and the Gulf’s rapidly transforming landscape?
Amal Al Ali: The exhibition began from an interest in how visual culture absorbs and reflects the accelerated cycles of construction and redevelopment unfolding across Gulf landscapes. ‘Sunkissed’ brings together newly commissioned and recent works by Ahaad Alamoudi to examine how collective identity is continually negotiated through material culture, gesture, and the circulation of images. Drawing on symbols that often condense regional imaginaries such as the sun, sand and heat, the exhibition frames identity as something constantly shifting and produced in dialogue with environmental, technological and social transformation.
Ahaad Alamoudi, Tyre Mark, 2025. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Installation view: Ahaad Alamoudi: Sunkissed, Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah, 2026. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Shafeek Nalakath Kareem.
Repetition recurs throughout the exhibition as a loop, an echo, and a return. How did you frame this strategy as both a formal language and a reflection of contemporary life in the region?
Repetition operates as a structuring principle across the exhibition, both formally and conceptually. Looping videos, layered imagery and echoing soundscapes mirror the cyclical rhythms that shape everyday life in the region. Rather than signalling stasis or failure, repetition is treated as density: each return accrues new associations and reframings. Repetition becomes a way of thinking about how cultural meaning forms, through accumulation, circulation and reiteration.
Ahaad Alamoudi, Those Who Don’t Know Falcons Grill Them, 2018. Installation view: Ahaad Alamoudi: Sunkissed, Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah, 2026. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Shafeek Nalakath Kareem.
WHAT IS THIS?! destabilises the falcon as an idealised cultural emblem. What curatorial considerations shaped the decision to open the exhibition with this mediated, looping exchange?
WHAT IS THIS?! immediately establishes the exhibition’s conceptual stakes. Operating at a human scale, it presents itself almost as a body or participant within the gallery, and its looped exchange draws viewers into a durational encounter. The falcons’ back-to-back positioning encourages viewers to move around the work, re-experiencing it from multiple vantage points and reinforcing its cyclical logic. In this iteration, the dune backdrop visually layers with nearby works, echoing both stratified desert topographies and the stacked simultaneity of digital screens.
Ahaad Alamoudi, Tyre mark (detail), 2025. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Motaz Mawid.
In The Great Catch, reconfigured fly traps engage in a mechanical dialogue. How do you interpret this act of technological ‘conversation’ within the broader discourse of memory, obsolescence and adaptation?
The work transforms utilitarian devices designed for extermination into objects seeking recognition, dignity and care. Their exchange suggests a world in which objects must affirm one another’s value in the absence of external validation. Within this framework, obsolescence is reframed not as disappearance but as a transitional state. Technologies persist beyond their intended lifespan, adapting through new roles and relationships. The conversation between the fly traps becomes a metaphor for memory itself: what is forgotten does not vanish but lingers, reactivated through repetition, attention and reinterpretation.
Ahaad Alamoudi, Those Who Don’t Know Falcons Grill Them, 2018. Installation view: Ahaad Alamoudi: Sunkissed, Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah, 2026. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Shafeek Nalakath Kareem.
Let’s not twist and turn stages an absurd choreography of toy cars and construction vehicles. How does this work articulate the psychological and material fatigue embedded within narratives of ceaseless development?
The work condenses monumental processes of extraction and construction into a miniature theatre of exhaustion. The toy vehicles, miniature emblems of endurance, mobility and desert traversal, climb over one another in a strained ascent toward an unidentified peak. The pile-up evokes the remnants discarded through cycles of constant development and change. The elements in motion – the solitary circling toy car and the vehicle in the looped video – remain suspended in a state of stagnant movement, exerting force without arrival. This tension between motion and stillness materialises the fatigue embedded within narratives of perpetual progress.
The Tyre mark series translates viral digital imagery into painted form. How do you see this movement from screen to canvas complicate ideas of ephemerality, authorship, and permanence?
The series captures frames from a widely circulated regional video in which a man traces tyre marks into sand. Ahaad Alamoudi paints over screenshots already laden with digital residue, such as Snapchat watermarks, subtitles, and compression artefacts from repeated sharing. A fleeting piece of online media is thus granted material presence and a sense of permanence. This act of reinscription interrupts the logic of viral circulation, which depends on speed, repetition and disposability. By fixing a transient gesture within a slower medium, the work complicates authorship and temporality: the anonymous action, its digital recording and its painterly reinterpretation coexist within a single surface.
Ahaad Alamoudi, The Great Catch (detail), 2026. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Installation view, Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah, 2026. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Motaz Mawid.
Earlier works, such as Those Who Don’t Know Falcons Grill Them and Bahara, Men of the Sea, foreground performance, rhythm and collective memory. How did you position these pieces in dialogue with the newer works to trace continuities in Alamoudi’s practice?
The earlier works were positioned as anchors that highlight the artist’s longstanding engagement with rhythm, repetition and collective experience. In Those Who Don’t Know Falcons Grill Them, choreography suspends bodies in cycles of anticipation, while Bahara transforms a shared maritime chant into a trance-like sonic environment. Alongside newer works, they reveal how her practice has expanded across media while remaining focused on how repetition shapes memory, identity, and social space, and on how ideas of progress often unfold in cycles rather than linear trajectories.
Ahaad Alamoudi, Tyre mark (detail), 2025. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Motaz Mawid.
Humour and pop cultural fluency run alongside more solemn reflections on heritage and transformation. How did you shape the exhibition’s spatial and conceptual rhythm to sustain this nuanced balance?
The exhibition was structured as a sequence of tonal modulations rather than a linear narrative. Playful elements such as talking falcons, toy cars and memes invite immediate engagement, while quieter installations encourage contemplation and critical reflection. This contrast mirrors the exhibition’s conceptual framework: cultural life as a negotiation between spectacle and reflection, speed and pause, aspiration and lived experience. Humour serves as a means of access, allowing complex questions about heritage, development, and transformation to surface through familiarity and play.
The exhibition is on view at Sharjah Art Foundation until 3 May 2026.
