Hafez Gallery Announces: Faisal Samra - Other Body Series 

Riyadh, 4 January 2026 – Hafez Gallery presents Other Body Series (1997-2004), a  solo exhibition by Bahraini-born, Saudi multidisciplinary artist Faisal Samra, opening  Wednesday, 21 January 2026 at H19 Gallery, JAX District, Riyadh (7pm). The exhibition  runs through 21 March 2026. Long considered one of the Arab Gulf's foremost artists and a pioneer of conceptual art  in the Middle East, Faisal Samra incorporates digital photography, painting, sculpture,  video, and performance to explore existentialist themes with the figure at its centre.  Trained at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (1974-1980), Samra has  continually rebelled against conventional representation, from expressionist drawings  investigating the body in motion, to landmark installations at Institut du Monde Arabe that  blurred painting and sculpture. 

The Other Body Series marks a pivotal moment in this trajectory, liberating treated canvas  from stretchers through wire mesh armatures and diverse materials that gain dimension  from ambient air. Rectangular sheets of fabric and textured skins mount directly to walls  in deliberate simplicity,  while large transparent forms, faintly resembling  human heads on abstraction's verge, contain materials transformed by fire. What remains are shadows cast on white walls: echoes of memory suspended in light. 

As art critic Frans J. Sterk wrote in 2000: "In contemplating Faisal Samra's works, one  becomes aware of the mysterious silence veiling them... Large transparent forms  resemble head contours on the verge of abstraction. Their imprisoned contents, touched  by rebellious fire, cleansed through creation's purgatory. What remains is a shadow of  memories on the bright night of the artist's velvet dream." 

The Other Body works evoke a travelling, nomadic spirit, minimal surface signs as  reminiscences of vast spaces to wander, memories of walls carrying slanted light across  sensitive pores. Through meticulous material research and spontaneity, Samra captures  undercurrents of memory sleeping in silent corners of the mind: accumulations of lives,  experiences, impressions, sensations.

Artist Statement  

This project—Immortal Moment 3: Post- Creatures 2, to which the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale work (2026) belongs—comprises three levels: 

First: The physical body/support of the artwork. It belongs to and returns to my first research  project, Al-Mu‘allaqat, on the origin of the artwork—materially and conceptually—in the heart of  the Arabian Peninsula before Islam, during it, and after it, among people of nomadic (Bedouin)  tribes and settled communities. Poetry was the form and the vessel that contained, discussed,  expressed, and documented all aspects of these people’s culture and lives. The first material  bearer of this poetry was what was called the Mu‘allaqat: thin pieces of animal skin on which  poems by the foremost poets of various tribes and urban groupings in the Arabian Peninsula were  written, to be displayed and hung on the walls of the Holy Kaaba at certain times of the year, such  as the pilgrimage and the ‘Ukaz market. There, they would select the best poetry, and poets would  compete in reciting their “hanging” poems; the audience would then choose the very best. Thus,  at the root of the matter, the Mu‘allaqat are the first works of art hung on walls, arising from the  very culture, people, and land to which I belong and to which the human being of this civilization  belongs—distinct from the body of Western art (the icon and the painting) or that of the Far East  (manuscripts and murals). I began researching this project in 1986 and started executing the first  Mu‘allaqa in 1987—my second return to Paris to work after the first phase of study, which ended  with my graduation in 1980 and my return to my homeland, Saudi Arabia, where I worked until 1987. In 1989 I held the first solo exhibition for this project in Paris, titled The Act of Nomadism. 

This project led to offshoot projects that vary in appearance yet are united in essence, including  Other Body, first shown in Jeddah in 2000, from which I will exhibit works—never shown before— during the biennale at Hafez Gallery . The most recent offshoot of this project is the biennale work,  Immortal Moment 3. 

Second:The concept of visual content. Its method of realization relies on intervention, dialogue,  and improvisation within a defined framework—not on dictating and executing a pre-formed  mental image and rendering it, in full detail, onto the artwork’s support. On this basis, it is necessary to document the moment of intervention when its first act is carried  out and applied to the forming material, provided it is free from the artist’s direct control, with a  large margin dependent on remotely guided chance—so as to create an independent and, to  some extent, fair dialogue between the artwork and the executor/performer. As for the direct philosophical dimension of this visual content, it is the documentation of the  moment of “now” through its visual equivalent: the point (dot) and the trace of kinetic action upon  the forming material. From the accumulations of these two elements—through the  improvised/guided dialogue between the performer and the elements of formation within the  space of the artwork—emerges the final visual form, which is at the same time unfinished,  depending on the performer’s decision to stop the dialogue at a certain moment so that it becomes  the Immortal moment that remains as the trace of that dialogue that took place—completed by  each viewer of the work, each according to their own vision and angle.

Exhibition Details 

Dates: 21 January – 21 March 2026 

Opening: Wednesday, 21 January 2026,  7pm 

Venue: H19 Gallery, JAX District, Riyadh