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SUSPENDED PRESENCE

9 March - 30 April, 2026

Time accelerates, attention fragments, and emotion is increasingly shaped by systems designed to optimize response rather than experience. While everything moves forward, something within us hesitates, allowing the works of this exhibition to unfold within a present that feels unfinished.

Suspended Presence does not seek to explain these conditions, but to slow them down. The works do not offer answers; instead, they invite reflection, exploring moments of waiting, suspension, and quiet resistance. They search for a visual language within scattered time to document consciousness as it shifts and destabilizes, yet continues to insist on being felt and lived.

At its core, Suspended Presence asks what it means to inhabit the present when presence itself feels increasingly fragile.

FEATURED ARTISTS

Donia Alshetairy

Artist

Donia Alshetairy (b. 1983) is a Saudi-based visual artist whose practice is grounded in systems thinking and
philosophical inquiry. With a background in information technology and system analysis, she approaches an
artistic methodology that focuses on dismantling epistemic, perceptual, and temporal structures, examining
how meaning is constructed, regulated, and destabilized within contemporary systems.

Her work investigates the conditions of modern awareness, shaped by acceleration, mediation, and
non-linear forms of time. Rather than treating language, sound, or memory as static subjects, she engages
them as active forces—mechanisms that organize attention, interrupt continuity, and redefine presence.
Central to her practice is an inquiry into how human perception negotiates systems designed to optimize,
archive, or erase experience.

Material and spatial decisions emerge from this conceptual framework. Through installations and abstract
compositions, Alshetairy constructs environments where vibration, rhythm, silence, and distortion function
as tools to render the intangible perceptible. These works enact specific conditions, positioning the viewer
within states of delay, tension, or perceptual instability.

Alshetairy has presented her work in institutional and exhibition contexts regionally and internationally,
including the Sharjah Art Museum, “From Within” by the Saudi Ministry of Culture in Diriyah, and exhibitions
in Berlin, Cairo, and Basel. Across her practice, she maintains a rigorous dialogue between thought and
matter, treating the artistic site as a testing ground where perception is measured against the pressures of
the contemporary moment.

Donia Alshetairy

FEATURED ARTWORK

LOCATION

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Al Falah Schools — Historic Jeddah

Our newest space in the historic district, marking the next chapter of our institutional journey.

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