Ahmed Mater, physician-turned-artist, a significant cultural voice documenting and scrutinising the realities of contemporary Saudi Arabia, creates his new work Ashab Al-Lal that will explore the mythic space between subjective imagination and objective reality by generating a mirage within the sand dunes.
Lying beneath a giant oculus in the floor of the desert will be a subterranean chamber that acts as a ‘mirage machine’. Ahmed Mater’s Ashab Al-Lal takes inspiration from the Book of Optics written by the medieval Arab scholar Ibn-al-Haytham who first defined the nature of light and perception. Visitors will descend through tunnels into Mater’s circular chamber where their image will be transformed into a mirage that hovers above the desert floor. The physical world and our cognitive faculties come together to generate a spiritual and transcendental experience.
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