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About
Born in 1979, Ahmed Mater lives and works in Abha, capital of the mountainous Aseer region in southern Saudi Arabia, where he combines his career as an artist with that of a medical doctor at the local hospital.
Mater may best be described as an illuminator of both form and ideas and a man of energy and few habits. It is from this knowledge of both loss and enlightenment that Mater appears to have the ability to move from expressing sadness and anger to sharing his insights with a sense of humor and lifegiving lightness. In the work which has brought him fame in both Europe and the Middle East, he combined explicit notes from his medical education with a palimpsest of religious symbols and cultural references.
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Mob.:+966 5 02368263
info@ahmedmater.com
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Green Antanna by Ahmed Mater
Green Antanna by Ahmed Mater
A Boy Stands on the flat, dusty rooftop of his family’s traditional house in the south west corner of Saudi Arabia. With all his reach he lifts a battered TV antenna up to the evening sky. He moves it slowly across the mountainous horizon, in search of a signal from beyond the nearby border with Yemen, or across the Red
Sea towards Sudan. He is searching, like so many of his generation in Saudi, for ideas, for music, for poetry – for a glimpse of a different kind of life.
His father and brothers shout up from the majlis (sitting room) below, as music fills the house and dancing figures appear on a TV screen, filling the evening air with voices from another world. “This story says a lot about my life and my art” Ahmed tells
me, as he installs a bright, white neon antenna into the ceiling of a warehouse gallery in Berlin. “I catch art from the story of my life,” he continues. “I don’t know any other way.”
Ahmed Mater is the boy with the antenna; a young explorer in search of contact with the outside world, reaching out to communicate across the borders that surround him. It is this spirit of creative exploration and curiosity that defines Ahmed’s journey as an artist.
Stephen Stapleton | Berlin | June 2010