Photographs in Doha’s Tasweer photo festival explore belonging, identity and home in the Arab world

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AL-AHSA: Saudi Arabia’s lush oasis of Al-Ahsa will be in full bloom in Italy next week at the 24th Triennale Milano International Exhibition, which runs from May 13 to Nov. 9 at Milan’s Palazzo dell’Arte. 

Al-Ahsa is officially recognized as the world’s largest oasis, and is home to more than 2.5 million date palms.  

The Kingdom’s debut pavilion at the exhibition is “Maghras: A Farm for Experimentation,” which, according to the exhibition’s website, is “structured as a transplanted maghras — a unit of land demarcated by four palm trees” and “symbolically frames the dialogues, material traces, soundscapes of field recordings, and speculative gestures emerging from the space.” 

The pavilion, commissioned by the Architecture and Design Commission under the Ministry of Culture, and curated by longtime friends Lulu Almana and Sara Al-Omran, along with US-based creative director Alejandro Stein, is inspired by Al-Ahsa’s Al-Sbakh Farm, established by the late Noura AlMousa. The farm is now managed by the Abdulmonem Alrashed Humanitarian Foundation (named after its founder, AlMousa’s son) and the Noura AlMousa House for Culture and Arts, housed in AlMousa’s former home. 

“We’re really continuing on the lineage of the matriarch,” Al-Omran tells Arab News when we meet the curators at the farm. “Her spirit feels very present because she really cared about craft and culture.” 

Almana and Al-Omran commissioned three Saudi artists to work on the pavilion: Leen Ajlan, a London-based designer from Jeddah; Mohammad Alfaraj, a contemporary artist whose family have been farming in Al-Ahsa for generations; and Tara Aldughaither, founder of Sawtasura, an audio research and learning platform focused primarily on female voices.  

Through videos, sound installations, and participatory programs, the pavilion will invite visitors to engage with the evolving agricultural ecosystems of Al-Ahsa.  

The maghras concept symbolically ties the exhibition to the land, offering an immersive experience that bridges past traditions with contemporary agricultural practices. 

“Technically, there are three participating artists but it’s more than that — there is a big team,” Almana says. “Then there’s all the research that’s being displayed through illustrations and maps and texts that the team worked on. There’s also all the programs and workshops that have been a big part of it.” The fruits of this collective effort will be published in a book later this year.   

Al-Omran explains that her grandparents are from Al-Ahsa. “I always hear, particularly from my grandfather, these stories of Al-Ahsa. And when he speaks about it, it feels like this mythical place that doesn’t really connect to what I see here (now),” she says. “I grew up in (Alkhobar), but would come here every week. Many of my best memories were here; running around on the farm, seeing the frogs and the rabbits and the sheep and playing around. And also understanding seasons and seeing crops and produce. But through conversations with him, I saw this contrast of the place that he talks about and the place I’m witnessing. And I realize that it’s really within a lifetime that the environment has shifted so much.” 

Al-Omran’s family, including her grandfather, attended the opening event at Al-Sbakh Farm last autumn, where they saw their hometown celebrated in a new light. 

“They’re proud. They’re really happy to see that Al-Ahsa is spoken about,” Al-Omran says. “They see that it’s not just about the past, but a way of thinking about the future.” 

The unfolding narrative of the project has emphasized community engagement. “It was really nice and natural,” says Almana. “It didn’t feel forced in any way. People were saying, ‘You’re doing something important.’ It felt impactful despite its small gestures.” 

After nearly a decade of living abroad in large, congested cities including London and New York, Almana says the initial intention for this project, for her, “was that I needed to get rooted into a place, build knowledge, and build a community of like-minded people who share similar concerns, questions and values: How do we preserve the identity of a place that’s constantly changing? How do we share our concerns and ideas for regeneration, for reviving certain things? It matters to build a community around these questions. Then everything becomes more meaningful and interesting.” 

Almana had only visited Al-Ahsa briefly up until five years ago, during COVID, when she finally spent a significant amount of time there. She found the place inspirational. “It hit me that there’s this urban-rural tension. The big cities get attention, but the rural, historic agricultural places are overshadowed. I wanted to dive into agriculture and build a community of like-minded people,” she says. 

Almana’s partnership with Al-Omran added an insider’s perspective to the project. In Milan, visitors will experience the “true essence” of Al-Ahsa, the pair say.  

“We really wanted to represent Maghras in the most authentic way,” Almana explains. “It’s a community-based project within a morphing landscape, not just a static thing.” 

And Milan, she hopes, is just the start. “We want this to grow into something longer-term, and we’ve conveyed that to the ministry, which supports this vision,” she says. 

Al-Omran stresses the amount of research that was involved in creating the pavilion. “We’re looking at a display of research material that we assembled for our first event back in October. And at that point we had spent about three or four months looking at archival research and doing a lot of interviews.” 

The first activation was both a presentation and a checkpoint.  

“We wanted to take a moment to sift through the material we’d come across and the conversations we’d listened to. It was important to do that during the opening, where we welcomed the community and spoke about the project, because it was important to hear people’s reflections on the research as it emerges; we felt that would influence the direction,” she says. 

“Sometimes we don’t really realize what’s lost until generations have passed. And it felt like we were in a moment where the shifts are happening,” she continues. “So it felt urgent to talk about it now, while that generation is still around.”