Between Memory and Matter

Bin Matar House in Muharraq presents Between Memory and Matter, a solo exhibition by the Saudi artist Zahrah Alghamdi. It runs from 19 October to 9 December 2026 and opens on 18 October at 7pm. The house, a restored building linked to the Bin Matar family and the pearl trade, is run by the Shaikh Ebrahim bin Mohammed Al Khalifa Center for Culture and Research. The Centre describes the show as new work, developed from her drawings of the human figure and made from organic materials she works with physically.

In the Centre's account, the figures begin as drawings and take form in matter that Alghamdi handles herself where the work is made. Traces of her body are held in the material, and the exhibition becomes a place where her gestures are fixed. The Centre ties this matter to Al Baha, her birthplace, and reads it as a link between past and present. It calls the works "personified figures that represent memory" and frames the show around grief that people share, with the body as the way in.

Alghamdi, born in 1977 and based in Jeddah, builds installations from soil, clay, sand, leather, cotton and acacia branches. Her figures start on paper. From 2021 onwards she drew more than fifty studies of solitude, grief, joy and resilience, and later remade them in leather, clay and embroidered fabric. An exhibition with the same title, curated by Daria Kirsanova, was shown at ATHR Gallery in Riyadh from 29 September to 20 November 2025. That presentation included Echoes of the One in Many I (2025), a leather circle of bodies 400 by 400 centimetres. It also showed the embroidered fabric series One Pulse, Many Lives and Remnants, a site-specific installation in burnt leather.

In 2019 Alghamdi showed After Illusion, a solo presentation in the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia at the 58th Venice Biennale. She made a commission for the British Museum in 2017 and took part in Desert X AlUla in 2020 and the first Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale in 2021. Her work was in Art Here 2023 at Louvre Abu Dhabi and in Arabofuturs at the Institut du monde arabe, Paris, in 2024. Her work is in the collections of the British Museum, the Centre Pompidou and Art Jameel.