Saudi Arabia is a country where past and present collide with unusual force. In the span of a single generation, its cities have been remade from the ground up — ancient districts bulldozed, skylines rebuilt, social codes rewritten. Memory persists nonetheless. And for a growing number of Saudi artists, the gap between what was and what is has become the central preoccupation of their practice.

Maha Malluh treats nostalgia as archaeology — gathering the detritus of daily life before it disappears. Fatimah Al-Nemer archives the inner lives of women whose stories were never formally recorded. Muhannad Shono returns to a single childhood memory of censorship and unfolds it into a meditation on imagination and what endures. Bashaer Hawsawi works with papyrus to ask what it even means to preserve something when the act of preservation changes what is preserved.

Together, they form a portrait of a culture in active negotiation with its own past — one in which nostalgia is not an escape from the present, but one of the most urgent ways of engaging with it.

Maha Malluh has spent nearly five decades gathering the objects a culture decides to throw away. Cassette tapes of religious sermons, burned cooking pots, enamelled dishes, discarded oil barrels — in her hands, these become historical evidence. Her work asks what happens to a society's self-understanding when it modernises too fast.

One of her most significant series, Food for Thought, makes this sensibility concrete. In works like Do You Want to Be Happy (2012), she mounts cassette tapes containing religious lectures onto vintage wooden bread trays from old bakeries — pressing together the language of spiritual instruction and the ritual of communal nourishment. The result is dense with implication: about how ideology travels through objects, how it shapes daily life without announcing itself as power.

"I like to work with objects that are going to disappear from our life," Malluh has said, "in order to preserve our identity and our cultural memory. What was once trivial may become powerful again." Her work is held in the collections of the British Museum, Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi, among others.

Fatimah Al-Nemer was born in Al-Qatif, a city in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province that predates Christianity by six centuries. That depth of history is not background — it is the ground on which her practice stands. Working across oil, acrylic, collage, textile, and her own printing techniques, she has spent nearly nine years building an archive of women whose lives circulated in oral tradition and family memory but were never formally recorded.

Her series Dkhoun — the word means the finest types of precious incense — draws directly on this archive. The figures in these works are specific: a princess who led her tribe through crisis, a woman who raised her children alone through famine, a bride-dresser known across the Qatif region for her ceremonial skill. Al-Nemer often places herself within these narratives, inhabiting the figures she depicts.

Her more recent exhibition, Memory of Clay (Riyadh, 2025), extends this into the material itself — palm fronds, clay, and wool presented not as relics but as active carriers of knowledge. "Clay is not just a medium," she has said. "It is a mirror of our collective memory, cracking to reveal hidden layers of nostalgia and wisdom."

Muhannad Shono's early experience of belonging held provisionally — contingent on documents rather than roots — runs through everything he makes. He studied architecture, and his installations have the quality of built environments: immersive, structural, impossible to take in from a single vantage point.

The formative memory at the centre of his practice is a classroom experience of censorship. In Saudi schools, figures in textbooks were crossed out with a heavy line, rendering the human form inaccessible. For Shono, that line became a kind of origin — the moment he understood that absence could be generative. His major work, The Teaching Tree, created for the Saudi Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), makes this transformation literal: a forty-meter installation of palm fronds and pneumatic systems that breathe, expand, and refuse to be finished.

Bashaer Hawsawi works with mixed media and found objects, drawing on what she describes as "a vast visual database" formed by her early life in Jeddah — a storehouse of sensory impressions and daily habits that she returns to and reshapes.

Her series Qanfager (2021) works with papyrus, one of the oldest technologies of human memory. The choice is deliberate: papyrus carries its own history as a vehicle for transferring knowledge across generations, and Hawsawi uses it to ask what preservation actually does. Across the papyrus layers, she applies colored inks in varying degrees — sometimes vivid, sometimes absorbed into the material and hidden from view. The more explicit the colour, she suggests, the closer one comes to confronting reality; the more it recedes, the more meaning moves inward, awaiting discovery.

Her work Cleansing, made with African cloth and red brooms, pushes this further — asking whether the drive to remove and purify carries within it a quiet violence against memory. For her, nostalgia is not looking backwards. It is something already present in the texture of daily life, persisting beneath the surface of whatever comes next.