All Beautiful Things Are Fragile is a poignant group exhibition at ATHR Gallery in Riyadh (KSA) that explores the delicate threads of memory, identity, and loss in a region where histories are continually rewritten. Part of ATHR’s broader Art Week Riyadh programming under the theme #MakeYourMark, the exhibition engages in a poetic conversation about fragility, whether cultural, personal, or collective. It will run through 26 June 2025.
One of the standout works on display is We Shouted into the Wind (2025), a video piece by Sudanese artist, researcher, and translator Rund Alarabi. The work traces the ghostly connection between the Red Sea port cities of Jeddah (KSA) and Sawakin (Sudan), where coral stones from the latter were transported to construct Jeddah’s historic Al-Balad district in the 1800s. Through a dialogue between two spirits, the video imagines the unravelling of immaterial worlds as their physical foundations begin to erode.
Also featured is a sculpture from the Distortion series (2011) by Saudi-Palestinian artist Ayman Yossri Daydban, who interrogates national symbolism in the context of globalisation. Drawing from his earlier flag series, the artist reconfigures the familiar forms of Arab flags: he removes their iconic colours and reduces them to raw metal sheets. These deconstructed flags, no longer carrying their symbolic palette, challenge the fixed meanings of national identity and its visual codes.
French-Lebanese artist Tamara Kalo contributes Olive Leaves Memories (2024), a handmade folding book that pays tribute to the olive tree, a living witness to generational memory and sacred cycles of harvest now interrupted by violence. By embedding olive leaves in recycled plastic and transforming them into photograms, Kalo invites viewers into a quiet collaboration between artist and tree. The work, both archive and elegy, calls us to listen to the land and remember what it holds.
Athier Mousawi, a British-Iraqi artist, presents a painting from his Fragile Handle With Care series, which reflects on the displacement of people and their belongings during perilous migrations. The title of the series draws from the standard shipping label for delicate objects: an ironic contrast to the human stories it references. Within each painting, imagined objects are rendered as abstract forms, enclosed within grid-like frames that recall the protective cube, suggesting both containment and vulnerability.
On view are also works by Iraqi-Finnish artist Adel Abidin, Saudi artist and filmmaker Mohammad Alfaraj, architect and painter Hayfa Algwaiz, French artist Neil Beloufa, Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj, and Egypt-born artist Basim Magdy.
To get more information about All Beautiful Things Are Fragile, please visit the exhibition’s official web page.
In addition, you might be interested in attending Threads of Light: Stories from the Tasweer Single Image Awards, a collective exhibition.
To stay updated with the latest art news, you can join our Telegram channel.
