Curators’ Intention

Everything is a work in progress, including our ideas, existence, spaces, and histories. The show addresses how artists constantly develop their craft, allowing them to present experimental, unfinished, evocative, and aspirational works. Knowing that you don’t have to finish an artwork to have something beautiful can be liberating for whatever that may mean to the different artists’ practices, especially since unfinished works are usually irrelevant to an artist’s practice in their lifetimes and only become essential after their passing. Yet these artists allowed their works in progress or works using progress to be presented as their own aesthetic and conceptual existence without the need to showcase what the work could become beyond a simple intention.

Bilal Allaf presents a two-stream video exploring an idea from a longer potential film and the act of editing. Albinali shows us an animal hide with some embossing as an experimental comment on consumerist waste. Latifa AlBokhari’s work is an unfinished concept, a first iteration, of an idea about which she has been conceptualizing but had never realized. Hayfa Algwaiz would work on multiple pieces at the same time then stop to contemplate the trajectory of the artwork, fully realized with its unfinished frame. Kawkab’s work is a work that has lived in her head for a while but never saw the light until she decided that it does not need to be the final version for it to be displayed. Daniah Alsaleh used the remnants of works she had had created as part of her process but never needed to create a triptych, however only two were completed by the time of this show. Aymen Zedani allows us into his everyday work with his experimental works within his Timekeepers series, clarifying that the producing art isn’t a one day production but an ongoing disciplined act of play. Meshaal Alzeer literally is continuously working on a large painting in which he expresses his feelings towards AlUla and the place in which he lives and this show and space exists.

The NEST is also considered a work in progress as it is finding its footing as an underground space to support the creative output at whatever stage of development. The space was the typical Majlis created in the homes of Saudis as a seating area for the male figures of the family to meet their friends. It has a separate entrance and facilities to allow for its own separate life. The use of this space is a nod to the industry before it was one in Saudi. The space where exhibitions use to exists before institutions and where artists used to exchange ideas and concepts in progress, connecting the space and the concept together.