Mohammed Ajlan
Hafez Gallery presents “The Legends of Motherland”, a solo exhibition by Saudi artist and researcher Sarah Al Abdali, on view from April 21 to May 24, 2026 at Al Balad Al Fallah School in Historic Jeddah. Marking the artist’s third solo exhibition in the city, the presentation offers a nuanced meditation on Jeddah
’s stratified identity, where myth and history remain in constant, generative tension.
Anchored in the metaphor of Motherland, as both origin and threshold, the exhibition approaches the city as a living entity, one that undergoes cycles of dormancy and renewal. Drawing on the enduring narrative of Jeddah as the resting place of Eve, Al Abdali reflects on the city as a site of passage and accumulation, where memory, belief, and lived experience converge and evolve over time.
Long engaged with questions of material culture and representation, Al Abdali here adopts a more distilled and abstract visual language. Through a body of work spanning painting, textile, and print-based practices, she examines the porous boundary between what is preserved, what is lost, and what is reconstituted through collective imagination. Architectural and cultural fragments emerge throughout the exhibition as traces of a heritage that resists erasure even as it recedes into myth.
Central to “The Legends of Motherland”, is the proposition of myth as an active, living structure rather than a fixed account of the past. Within this framework, the exhibition foregrounds the feminine dimension of the city as a locus of transmission, shelter, and continuity, subtly embedded within both form and material.
The exhibition brings together gouache and charcoal works, hand-printing techniques, and textile-based compositions, expanded through two significant collaborations. The first, with Tabaa’, a label founded by the artist, is embodied in Grantors of Permission, where flowing silk threads articulate two Hijazi female figures within a composition inspired by the roshan (mashrabiya) architectural form. The second, coordinated by Dr. Saif Al-Rashidi, engages master artisans from Cairo specializing in khayamiya, one of the oldest textile traditions in the Islamic world. These collaborations extend the exhibition’s inquiry into temporality, craftsmanship, and the transmission of knowledge across generations.
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