PARIS: Mohammad Alfaraj was born in the world’s largest desert oasis — Al-Ahsa — in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. He is the son and grandson of date farmers.
The 31-year-old artist was one of the participating artists in the AlUla Artist Residency in 2021, and is now showing the results of that residency for the first time as part of the “Orbis Tertius” exhibition at the Art Basel Paris international art fair, which opened Oct. 18 in Paris’ newly restored Grand Palais.
He describes himself as “an artist and a poet — a poet of visuals.”
“I was talking with one of the other AlUla Residency artists about this, and we agreed that both of us try to encapsulate poems and poetry into objects, poems that you can hold, and touch and feel, and smell,” Alfaraj tells Arab News.
A still from Alfaraj's 'The Date Fruit of Knowledge.' (Supplied)
His route to becoming an artist wasn’t a straightforward one. He studied Applied Mechanical Engineering at King Fahad University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran. “When I began my studies in 2011, there wasn’t much focus on filmmaking or photography in Saudi, and they were what interested me. But it was beautiful, because understanding how things work and how to build them is a relevant subject for a curious mind. One of my favorite courses was Mechanics of Materials. I learned that everything is alive, even inanimate objects emit a vibration, an energy. I wanted to complete my degree, but also to pursue my career as an artist,” he explains.
His agricultural background has also inspired his work.
“Growing up on a farm, it’s deeply ingrained to reuse everything we find around us,” he says. “We don’t call it ecology, we call it resources; there is no waste, no excess, nothing gets thrown away. A bird builds its nest from the things it finds lying around, bits of straw, bits of plastic. I call that ‘honestly built.’”
'The Last Words of a Tree 2,' currently on show at Art Basel Paris. (Supplied)
A bird is the central focus of one of Alfaraj’s Art Basel installations, “The Date Fruit of Knowledge.” The stop-motion film, with narration over the top, was drawn in the sand of the palm groves of AlUla.
“It’s the story of a little nightingale who’s trying to get all the knowledge of the world. He’s impatient; he wants everything immediately. Someone tells him the legend, ‘Each palm tree produces one date that holds all the knowledge of the world.’ So he finds a palm tree and eats every single date that it produces to hit that one date. He becomes obsessed, he wants to stop, but he cannot, he’s driven by that greed for knowledge,” Alfaraj says.
“Finally — finally — he finds the date! And he knows everything, what is, what was, what will be. The problem is, when he knows everything, he knows everything — the good things he cannot enjoy, and the horrific things he cannot change — so this blessing becomes a curse. So the film is about this idea of getting things slowly, with time, and really experiencing the journey of life rather than instantly reaching your destination. Of course, it’s inspired by stories from the Qur’an, religious parables, folklore and mythologies around the world, so everybody can connect with it in some way,” he adds. “The ‘nightingale’ in the film is made out of dates, and he eats so many dates he almost dies. What I want to say by this is that our destruction could be by our own hands, but our salvation could be by our own hands too.”
Untitled 4, Mohammed Alfaraj, 2023. (Supplied)
The film is presented at Art Basel against a backdrop of Alfaraj’s illustrations, and palm fronds are placed in front of the screen in the shape of a bird’s wings.
“The paper (for the illustrations) is made from waste palm, the ink is also made from palm leaves, so the whole work is made from things that are normally discarded,” Alfaraj explains. “I like finding objects, collecting them and turning them into sculpture, or finding photographs and landscapes of places I visit and making them into something new. I think that’s awesome — finding, finding and then transforming.”
Alfaraj still lives in the place he was born, which remains a constant source of inspiration. Last year, he built himself a home on a farm there.
An installation shot of 'Hand,' from the 'Fossils of Time' series, Mohammed Alfaraj. (Supplied)
“It’s just a simple rectangle with a bedroom and kitchen and a studio where I work. It has a garden with date palms, mulberry trees, fig and lemon trees. I have a couple of chickens too, now.”
When he travels abroad, he keeps his carbon footprint as low as possible, even if that means staying away from home for months at a time.
Since the beginning of this year, he has been preparing his next exhibition in Dubai in parallel to Art Basel. He says he told his curator that he wants to be known as “an anti-SS” artist.
Mohammed AlFaraj with his work 'From What Bone Will We Grow Back On the First Day of Eternity.' (Supplied)
“It’s a play on words, which I always like. It means I am anti-style and anti-scale, because style and scale do not the drive the work, they are just the façade. The driver of the work should be the heart and the soul — and modesty too, humility. If the work requires a large scale, I’m happy to do that. But there is no reason to make it an objective to itself.”
Another of his Art Basel installations — from his “Last Words of a Tree” series — is titled “From What Bone Will We Grow Back On the First Day of Eternity?”
“I’ve used a certain part of a palm tree to make a sculpture that looks like bones, or a fossil, of a creature emerging from the earth,” he says. “I try to believe that with so much sacrifice going on, something great will happen, and hopefully, human glory will emerge; the evil and prejudices eradicated. So, I hope this work serves as an acknowledgement of everything that’s happening, but also contains a certain hope.”
