Along the Way

Misk Art Institute has opened 'Along the Way' at the Prince Faisal bin Fahd Arts Hall in Riyadh. The exhibition brings together 34 artists and 69 works across painting, photography, sculpture, digital practice and archival material, and it runs from 16 September 2026 to 31 March 2027, with free admission.

The starting point is travel, understood by the institute as both a physical and an intellectual act, and the show takes its cue from historical journeys, above all those of the 14th-century traveller Ibn Battuta. In the institute's words, travel becomes 'a passage through which the self is unsettled and remade'. Rather than a chronology, the works are arranged 'as a series of crossings rather than a linear progression'.

Maps run through the exhibition. The curatorial text treats cartography as an interpretive practice shaped by lived experience, and introduces ideas of affective cartography, maps of subjective experience, and poetic cartography, built on mythical and topological rather than purely geometric space. Rare manuscripts anchor the display, among them 'The Book of Fixed Stars' by the astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, a copy of 'Nuzhat al-Qulub' by al-Qazwini and an engraved astronomical disc.

The line-up is a roll call of the region and beyond. Saudi pioneers such as the late Safeya Binzagr and Manal AlDowayan, who represented Saudi Arabia at the 2024 Venice Biennale, hang alongside Iraqi modernist Dia al-Azzawi, Lebanese artist Marwan Rechmaoui and Syrian painter Ziad Dalloul, who is based in Paris. Younger Saudi voices include Moath Alofi, Filwa Nazer and Sara Alabdali, and the South Asian contingent includes Gulammohammed Sheikh, Anju Dodiya, and Gauri Gill with Rajesh Vangad.

For Riyadh, it is a long-running show, open for more than six months, and a chance to see Saudi practice set in conversation with Arab, South Asian and African artists around a shared regional history of journeys, trade and knowledge.