Jameel Arts Centre is currently holding Seas Are Sweet, Fish Tears Are Salty, a solo exhibition by Saudi artist Mohammad Alfaraj. Curated by Rotana Shaker, it features photography, video, sound, installation, and the latest site-specific commissions. The show will welcome all visitors until 4 January 2026.
With its title drawn from one of Alfaraj’s writings, the exhibition unfolds across the Centre’s indoor galleries and outdoor spaces. Through diverse works, the artist creates a poetic terrain in which recurrent motifs (hands, palm trees, birds, and narrative fragments) ripple between the real and the imagined. Visitors are invited into a world that is at once tactile and deeply reflective.
Alfaraj, who was born in Al-Ahsa, a desert oasis city in Saudi Arabia, and still lives there, is inspired by the region’s agricultural landscapes, oral traditions, and daily life. His practice is based on storytelling through written text, image, and material. It often explores ecological transformation, multispecies relationships, and the entanglements of memory and place. Many art pieces in the exhibition incorporate indigenous and found materials: palm fronds, dates, sheet metal, and everyday objects. They carry layered associations and encourage audiences to slow down and listen with care.
Across Jameel Arts Centre’s gardens and courtyards, the show blurs boundaries between space, story, and audience. One commissioned installation, Love is to leave the door to your garden ajar (2025), functions as a communal storytelling space, encouraging visitors to sit, read, or contribute their narratives. Through its gentle humour and metaphorical depth, Seas Are Sweet, Fish Tears Are Salty provokes contemplation on how we relate to each other, to our environments, and to the imaginative possibilities embedded in everyday life.
About the artist
Mohammad Alfaraj (b. 1993) is a multidisciplinary artist who obtained a BA in Mechanical Engineering from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (Dhahran, Saudi Arabia) in 2017, a background that continues to inform his inventive approach to materials, structure, and narrative.
Alfaraj’s work has been exhibited internationally in various shows and art events, which include, for example, More than meets the eye (Al Ula Arts Festival, Al Ula, KSA, 2024); The Date Fruit of Knowledge (solo) (Mennour, Paris, France, 2023); the 16th Biennale de Lyon (France, 2022); Islamic Arts Festival 22nd edition (Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah, 2019); and Saudi Film Festival (Dammam, KSA, 2015), where his student documentary Lost received first prize.
Alfaraj’s list of recognitions includes an Emerging Artist Medal and a Gold Award at Art Basel Miami Beach (2025), an Honourable mention at Plural+ Youth Video Festival (New York, USA, 2015), and winning Encountering Another World, the Crossway Foundation competition (2015).
For more information about Seas Are Sweet, Fish Tears Are Salty, please visit its official web page.
You might also be interested in viewing The Contingent Object by Shaikha Al Mazrou and exploring Playscape: I Dreamt of a City Everyone Calls Home.
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