Tradition and Modernity



Tradition and Modernity is a series ultimately about society’s transformation from tradition to our present modern day. The artist has found photograms most appealing; toying with objects and experimenting with different arrangements has become a playful expression of collective and personal experiences.

Occasionally understood as a force of ‘retention’, tradition can cause some to feel the need to isolate themselves from modernity’s monstrous reach. Opening the gateway to Paris, modernity and its accompanying high-speed aircraft, finds people screened, probed into and investigated. There means that there is no room for privacy and retention as all is exposed.

The objects chosen in these photogramic collages include trinkets relating to the country’s cultural heritage and present experience of modernity, part of Saudi Arabia’s material cultural make-up. Considering this multilayered history of past and present, the photograms can be posited in a discursive practice which attempts to deconstruct modernity’s obscene obsession with material culture.

Tradition and Modernity’, with its creative employment of photograms is a nostalgic expression for aesthetic appreciation of the everyday, the simple, the humble.