Saudi filmmaker, storyteller, and installation artist Mohammad Alfaraj hails from the agricultural and industrial city of Al-Ahsa, a place that has shaped his creative practice both physically and conceptually. Mohammad’s artwork, often featuring fables with human and nonhuman characters, draws on local and regional histories to explore everyday life and environmental issues as well as to reflect on Saudi natural history. His multidisciplinary practice relies on found materials, such as palm fronds, sand, and dates, in a nod to the environmental pillars of his hometown.

Mohammad’s installations foreground education and inclusion as goals. But instilling climate consciousness in viewers is a constant subtext in Mohammad’s work, which reveals an appreciation for nature and a desire to showcase his country’s environmental diversity. Having exhibited in and completed residencies worldwide, from Jeddah and Sharjah to Florence and Barcelona, Mohammad’s astute skill in using simple materials to tell complex stories makes him one to watch in the flourishing Saudi art scene.

AGSIW spoke to Mohammad to learn more about what inspires his work, how he channels the spirit of Al-Ahsa and Saudi Arabia more broadly into his creative practice, and the potential for using found materials as a means for more sustainable art making. 

AGSIW: Tell us about yourself and your journey to becoming an artist. 

Mohammad: I’m from Al-Ahsa, Saudi Arabia, in the Eastern Province. I studied mechanical engineering in university, but I was drawing and taking pictures well before that. In the middle of university, I decided to pursue art, photography and filmmaking in particular, and since then I’ve been an artist. I work with a couple of galleries: Athr Gallery in Saudi Arabia and Mennour Gallery in Paris. I also do a lot of writing – I help institutions here and there with their writing, programs, and workshops, since education is also a big part of what I do, which is creating worlds and stories that center humans and other species. The goal of creating these stories with these kinds of morals and poetics is to cultivate a sense of empathy in the audience and the person who is experiencing the work.

More technically speaking, I create stories, worlds, and installations using found materials, literally and metaphorically. I create sculptures from things that I find, organic and nonorganic, around the city or the countryside, but they are also based on things that I find in terms of my life: people that I encounter, conversations, religion, the Quran, the books that I read – bits and pieces from here and there.

AGSIW: How did education come to be a big part of your mission as an artist?

Mohammad: Education is important in my work, but I’m interested in knowledge in particular. One of the latest stories I wrote, which I then made into a film during my residency in Al Ula, is called the “Date Fruit of Knowledge.”

Essentially, it takes place in a big oasis where a lot of animals, people, and creatures live. Among them is a group of three friends: a bird, a creature that is half human and half insect, and a dragonfly. One day, as they are playing hide and seek in one of the valleys, during the bird’s turn to find his friends, the ghost of the endangered Arabian leopard manifests itself in front of him. The leopard tells the bird, “Are you always scared?” and the bird says, “Yes.” The leopard asks, “Do you feel like you don’t know anything most of the time?” And the bird says, “Yes.”

So, the leopard tells him, “I know your solution. Every palm tree bears one date that holds all the cosmic knowledge.” And the leopard disappears. The bird then decides to choose one palm tree to sit next to the following day and to try to eat every date it produces because he wants to get that “date of knowledge.” He eats one date, then two dates, then 20, and he starts to gain weight. In doing so, he is also stopping other animals from eating dates, so the search for knowledge makes him greedy and selfish, and he becomes addicted. One day, he eats a half ripe, half fresh date – a yellow and brown one – and his eyes go wide and his mind shines. Suddenly, he knows every name, every place, whatever was, whatever is, and whatever will be.

He meets with his friends the next day, and they invite him into the valley to see other friends of theirs. He says, “No, I don’t want to go. I already know everything.” But the problem when you know everything is that you know the beautiful things and the fun things, but when night comes, you think about the horrible and violent things in the world, too. The things that he enjoyed became boring, and the things that scared him he couldn’t do anything about. So, this blessing becomes a curse.

The next day, his friends notice that the bird is not himself and is not eating – “I’m not feeling well,” the bird says. “I know the solution to your problem,” says the dragonfly. So, they go to the desert, make coffee and a fire, and sit around it. The dragonfly tells him, “Chirp everything you know into the fire, for fire is the mistress of forgetfulness.” When the sun came up, he had chirped everything into the fire. It became bigger and bigger and bigger, but at the end it faded, he forgot everything and became an innocent, naive bird again, but at least he could enjoy life again.

So, in the end, there are these morals or sayings in these stories: enjoy life, date by date and day by day, meaning you don’t have to eat the date of knowledge – you can “eat” knowledge bit by bit.

AGSIW: What medium did you use to tell this story?

Mohammad: The story is the focus of a stop-motion film that I made in which I draw on sand and then project visuals onto these drawings, so you feel like the drawing is happening in front of you. I used this medium because I wanted to put myself in the position of the bird, too, in a way. I don’t want to make something fast – in the way that the bird wanted all the knowledge at once. I wanted to make something very low tech and rather high in meditation and in moral.

In some ways the story is also a metaphor for the world in general and the region. We’re going too fast with progress and the change that we’re undergoing. It’s beautiful and it’s necessary, but maybe we need to slow down a bit just for the sake of the experience and the journey – to get to enjoy it. And the idea of knowledge is – what do you really want to know? Because sometimes knowing something could be hurtful. And then, what are you going to do with that knowledge?

AGSIW: You mentioned that sand is one of the natural materials you use. What are some other materials that you use in your work?

Mohammad: I have a series that I love called “Fossils of Knowledge.” It is a series of sculptures and installations that take up entire spaces. Essentially, it consists of a skeleton-like creature that spreads out into the room or sometimes just a standing sculpture that I make using different parts of the palm tree, especially dead, thrown-away, and neglected parts. They appear like a fossil or something that’s been dug from the ground. The name “Fossils of Knowledge” draws on the idea of the palm tree and everything around it: the culture, the people connected to its teachings, the stories, and questioning if that is going away and being forgotten or if we can hold on to the thing that can help us move forward. It’s not about nostalgia but rather potentially not having to discard everything from the past – maybe you can take something from it, such as ancestral knowledge, that will help you to move forward with more clarity, more confidence.

AGSIW: Tell us about the somewhat different creative direction that you took with the Hayy Jameel facade commission.

Mohammad: I love getting commissioned to make art, but I always feel that commissions are a good chance to include other people, especially when it’s a project like the one at Hayy. It’s the facade of a building that people will pass by every single day going from home to work and back. So, I think it is only fair if people are included in the making of that facade that they will see every day. There was an open call to recruit Jeddah residents to work on this project, so we had people who were in their 50s down to teenagers and kids who were seven. We painted the facade over seven days, all the while talking, eating nice food, and listening to music. It was a beautiful time.

In terms of the design, the work is called “The Face of the City.” For me, the face of the city consists of its walls, especially graffitied walls, which is where emotions appear – sad, happy, angry, nostalgic, missing somebody – and that’s so beautiful. That’s where you see these very vulnerable sentences in the city – “I’m very lonely” or “I love you.” So, the facade design was inspired by the sentences, drawings, and phrases that are around Jeddah, which was at the time going through a big transformation in which a lot of neighborhoods were being demolished and rebuilt for different reasons – the main one being the poor quality of the architecture putting people in danger. There were also many undocumented people and places that needed to be organized.

So, it was a bittersweet moment, I think, for the city, and it was very important for me to document that period. It was nice because a lot of people from those neighborhoods actually joined us in making the piece.

AGSIW: The environment and nature are also key themes in your work. Do you see your practice as a vehicle to inspire a sense of consciousness or appreciation of nature with climate change?

Mohammad: It really comes naturally for me because I live in Al-Ahsa, an oasis that is half industrial and half agricultural. But at the same time, my decision to use found materials is intentional, because I think we already produce a lot of things in the world, and we don’t need to exploit any more resources. Another aspect of Al-Ahsa that I like to work with is the memories I have and my experiences in my hometown. It’s something that I feel strongly about. I liked my childhood there – it was hard but very beautiful at the same time. There is a new work that I hope I can make as an installation. I’m making a series of scarecrows based on different characters from my childhood; one of them is my aunt, for example. She’s a bit chubby and has golden teeth, so the installations are meant to be funny and humorous, but some of them are scary, too.

The idea I have in mind is of a scarecrow standing in front of a football with a goal in front of it. Everything would be made from wood and natural fibers – the net of the goal would be made from ropes. It would capture that frozen moment of a scarecrow standing on what looks like one leg – because that’s how scarecrows look. The viewer might wonder how the scarecrow is going to kick the ball, but really, it’s a frozen moment. The scarecrow won’t kick the ball. It goes back to my love of photography, where you stop something and capture a memory, frozen, forever. There will always be a tension in that moment, and you will always wonder if the scarecrow will move.

It’s not just capturing my memories or my childhood – it also resonates with a lot of childhood memories in the region. For instance, in Iraq or Syria, there are a lot of children who have lost their limbs and only have one foot, so they try to play football that way. It’s an image that’s been in my head, and this is a way to capture these bittersweet aspects of the world. It’s very happy and joyful, but it’s also real.

Of course, it also looks like a foosball character, and that’s something I want viewers to experience. I want them to find it silly but also poetic and a little bit sad. Maybe they’ll come out from the room wanting to live life even harder because of that and what they feel inside.