Ahaad Alamoudi, Between Memory and the Present

At Sharjah Art Foundation, Sunkissed by Ahaad Alamoudi looks at the cultural landscape of the Gulf as a space shaped by repetition, acceleration and friction between memory and the present. Born in Jeddah, the Saudi artist draws on familiar images and pop devices to question how visual identity is formed within a rapidly changing context. The exhibition brings together six recent works and new commissions that stage cycles without progression, suspended dialogues and reiterated gestures. In WHAT IS THIS?! two animated falcons, a central figure in the region’s visual imagination, engage in a fragmented looped conversation that unsettles the idea of a stable symbol. In The Great Catch, electric insect traps communicate through light and sound, holding time in a state of mechanical repetition. The theme of exhaustion runs through Let’s not twist and turn, where a toy car endlessly circles in front of a pile of miniature trucks, echoing the obsessive movement of construction sites and the remnants left behind by continuous development. In the painting series Tyre Mark, fragments of viral videos are fixed onto canvas together with their digital traces, turning fleeting images into permanent surfaces. Earlier works such as Those Who Don’t Know Falcons Grill Them and Bahara (Men of the Sea) root these reflections in bodily and sonic dimensions, drawing on dance, chant and collective memory. Curated by Amal Al Ali, Sunkissed avoids linear narratives and lingers instead on repetition as a condition of the present, rather than a purely formal strategy.