Invisible Systems

Hafez Gallery presents Invisible Systems, a solo exhibition by the Jeddah-based Saudi artist Maryam Tariq, at its new space in Al-Falah School in Al-Balad, Jeddah's historic district. The show runs from mid-September to mid-October 2026, bringing one of the Kingdom's most distinctive light and new media practitioners back to the gallery that gave her a debut solo show in 2021.

Tariq works with light installations, 3D projection mapping and immersive digital storytelling, and her practice turns on sacred geometry, memory, human consciousness and the spirituality she finds in the natural world. In Invisible Systems she explores the unseen forces that shape life, perception, memory and behaviour, giving physical form to phenomena that largely escape the human eye, from microscopic organisms drifting through the oceans to what the exhibition calls the silent architectures of trauma, technology and consciousness. Alongside the immersive works is a new glass sculpture, also titled Invisible Systems (2026).

One installation, Wings for the Directionless, is inspired by phytoplankton, the tiny organisms that produce much of the world's oxygen. In the exhibition catalogue Tariq calls them the "directionless travelers of the oceans", noting that unlike fish or dolphins, plankton cannot swim against the current: "They drift where the waters carry them, much like leaves floating downstream." She focuses on green algae, the living ancestor of all land plants. "Studying them offers a glimpse into how life made the leap from water to land," she explains, adding that hidden within their colonies are patterns of sacred geometry, "nature's tiny masterpieces, silent expressions of universal laws."

Each work asks the viewer what moves, guides and transforms individual and collective experience. It is a question Tariq has pursued since childhood, when her engineer father showed her salt arranging itself into patterns on a vibrating metal plate, an early lesson, she has said, in "the invisible forces that shape what we see".

The exhibition matters on two counts. It is a rare gallery solo for an artist whose light and projection work more often appears at festivals, concerts and public programmes such as Noor Riyadh, and it continues Hafez Gallery's new programme in Al-Falah School, a historic building in Al-Balad that the gallery opened as a venue in 2026, where contemporary art now sits within the living heritage of old Jeddah.