Time is never just one thing. It stretches between past and future, but also lives in memory, in waiting, and in the quiet weight of missed possibilities. It is something universal, yet it is deeply personal — shaped by where we come from, what we have lived through, and what we are still holding on to.

With artists, this relationship becomes more heightened. Not because they feel more, but because they find ways to express what often remains unspoken. They translate this abstract idea into something tangible — something that can feel emotional, personal, political, or even social all at once.

Here, we take a closer look at how Middle Eastern artists engage with time.

Emily Jacir is a Palestinian artist whose approach to time is deeply shaped by her origin. In her work, time is marked by loss, erasure, suspended memory, and a quiet, lingering exhaustion. At its core, it often returns to one idea: time as missed possibility. One of the most striking examples of this is her project Where We Come From.

In this work, Jacir asked Palestinians a simple question: “If I could do anything for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?” The responses she received were striking in their simplicity — small, everyday acts that many people take for granted. Visiting a mother’s grave. Drinking water in a parent’s village. Paying a bill. Walking through a hometown.

And while these desires are far from extraordinary for many, for Palestinians they often remain out of reach. Time, in this context, is constantly interrupted, controlled, and deferred by external forces. It no longer fully belongs to the individual.

Through the project, Jacir uses her own freedom of movement to carry out these requests where possible, turning small wishes into quiet yet powerful acts.

Hrair Sarkissian is a Syrian-Armenian artist whose work is deeply shaped by histories of war and displacement. In his practice, time becomes something that constantly moves between past and present — never fully settled in either, but always linking the two.

This comes through very clearly in Last Seen. In the project, Sarkissian photographs locations where people were last seen before disappearing, often in contexts of political violence. Visually, these places reveal little — no traces, no markers, nothing to explain what occurred. And yet, they hold a very specific moment: the point where time was suddenly interrupted.

In another project, Homesick, he shifts this concept of time slightly, moving from absence to reconstruction. Here, he recreates homes destroyed during the Syrian civil war as fragile architectural models, built from memory.

Time becomes tied not only to remembering, but to the fragility of that memory itself: spaces that were once solid and lived-in are reduced to something small and delicate, existing only as partial reconstructions.

Ahmed Mater is a Saudi artist whose work often centres around Mecca — a sacred place for Muslims and a point of gathering for millions of pilgrims each year. In his practice, time becomes a key player, unfolding across decades of transformation — not only physical, but also cultural and spiritual. What makes this especially striking is the contrast: despite constant change, Mecca continues to function in a cyclical rhythm, drawing people back year after year, almost unchanged in its meaning.

At the same time, Mater looks closely at how modernisation and global capitalism are reshaping this sacred space. Through projects like Desert of Pharan, he documents the city’s rapid expansion — construction sites, rising towers, landscapes in flux. But his work isn't just about documenting change; it is about questioning it.

In Mater’s work, time is never stable. It feels layered, sometimes fractured, often in quiet tension. The slow, repetitive time of faith exists alongside the fast, irreversible time of development — and the two don’t quite align.

Compared to Ahmed Mater, Rana Begum doesn’t approach time as something historical or narrative. Instead, she works with it more directly — almost as if time itself becomes part of the making, while also acting as a tool in the artist’s hands. It might sound abstract at first, but it begins to make sense once you look closer.

Rana works with light, colour, and geometric forms to create pieces that never feel entirely fixed. They respond to their surroundings, shifting with the time of day, the quality of light, and the viewer’s position. As the light changes, colours become either more muted or more intense, while shadows quietly emerge, shift, and recede. Even a 30-minute difference can completely alter what you see — so no two people ever experience the work in quite the same way. In that sense, time isn’t just present — it actively shapes the work alongside the artist.

Many describe her work as exploring the idea of the infinite. And while Begum herself has said this wasn’t the original intention, it naturally grows out of the repetition in her patterns and structures. Add the changing light and the movement of the viewer, and the work starts to feel endless — like it is constantly unfolding rather than ever fully settling.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s approach to time feels closely related to what Hrair Sarkissian explores — a focus on the aftermath, on what remains once something has already happened. But while Sarkissian often works through image and space, Abu Hamdan moves through sound, using it as a way to access events that can't be directly seen.

That said, some of his works go beyond sound alone, combining different forms. One of the clearest examples is The Freedom of Speech Itself, an installation that engages with the UK asylum system, exploring how British authorities have used voice and accent analysis to determine where asylum seekers come from.

Here, time isn't only about the past, but about how the present is used to judge it. A person’s history is reduced to a few moments of speech, sometimes even to a single word, analysed to decide their origin and, ultimately, their fate. At the same time, their future is suspended in long periods of waiting, shaped by decisions made through listening.