• A conflict of urban imaginaries: Ahmed Mater explores a brutally changing city in Mecca Journeys | MadaMasr

    https://www.madamasr.com/en/2018/04/19/feature/culture/a-conflict-of-urban-imaginaries-ahmed-mater-explores-a-brutally-changing-c

    The struggle between symbolic and actual space figures heavily in Saudi artist Ahmed Mater’s show Mecca Journeys, which ran at the Brooklyn Museum from December 2017 to early April. Made up of photographs, videos and sculpture, the exhibition focuses on work produced by Mater since 2009, when he began exploring Mecca’s brutally rapid transformation as the city underwent numerous monumental building projects. Mater’s work captures the marked dichotomies of Mecca’s recent explosive growth, exploring how inhabitants and visitors alike cope with the city’s increasingly changing landscape.

    As Islam’s holiest city and the annual pilgrimage destination for millions of Muslims, Mecca exists as a potent symbol and the nexus of a global ritual practice. But, as Mater emphasizes throughout Mecca Journeys, it is also home for over 1.5 million Saudis who experience the city as the setting of their everyday realities.

    Mater’s richly detailed, large-scale photographs present vistas laden with representations of socio-economic struggle, as untold fortunes are spent transforming Mecca’s urban fabric to better accommodate the flow of pilgrims, often at the expense of the comfort, stability, and livelihood of those who live in the city year-round. In the copious wall-texts that accompany his artworks throughout the show, the artist describes this contentious relationship as one of symbolic value run amok, the aura of the Kaaba motivating massive capital investment in urban renewal that necessarily favors the rich, while bulldozing the less economically fortunate under a wave of five-star luxury hotels and multi-lane highway projects.