Engagements and collaborations
In 2001, Mater co-founded the Shatta collective in Abha together with Ashraf Fayadh, Abdulnasser Gharem, Abdulkarim Qassem, and Muhammad Khidr. Shatta operated as a renegade art collective and issued a manifesto challenging the prevailing conventions of Saudi art practice, which at the time were regulated by the Ministry of Information. The collective employed conceptual and experimental media—digital imagery, clinical materials, and found objects—to contest established regional narratives and institutional boundaries.
In 2003, Mater, together with British artist Stephen Stapleton and Abdulnasser Gharem, co-founded Edge of Arabia at Al-Meftaha. Established as an artist-led platform for cultural exchange between Saudi Arabia and the wider world, Edge of Arabia grew over the following decade into one of the most significant vehicles for promoting contemporary Saudi art internationally. After five years of development, in 2008 the collective mounted its first major international exhibition at the Brunei Gallery of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. That same year, Mater’s X-ray painting X-Ray 2003 was acquired by the British Museum and included in Word into Art, the most comprehensive survey of contemporary Middle Eastern art held in Europe up to that point. In 2009, Mater was among eight Saudi artists to exhibit at the 53rd Venice Biennale, marking, alongside the inaugural UAE Pavilion, the Biennale’s first-ever presentation of Gulf artists.
Shift from medicine to full-time artmaking
During this period, Mater continued to practice medicine. In 2009, he served as a physician during the conflict on the Saudi Arabia–Yemen border, an experience that deepened his understanding of medicine as both a form of witnessing and scientific intervention. As his international artistic profile expanded, Mater began to transition away from his medical career in this period exhibiting in Saudi Arabia, the broader Middle East, Europe, and North America. In 2011, he relocated to Jeddah, and together with his former wife, artist Arwa Alneami (1985–), established Pharan Studio, a platform for exhibitions and critical exchange that operated privately, outside institutional frameworks. Around 2013, he founded Ibn Asir, a collective of Abha-based artists and designers dedicated to regional cultural production.
In 2017, Mater became the founding director of the Misk Art Institute in Riyadh, a role he held until 2019. During his tenure, he supervised the inaugural Saudi National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. In 2021, he established his studio in the Jax district of Diriyah, Riyadh, where he maintains his artistic practice and serves as a cultural adviser to the Ministry of Culture. He is also a board member of the the General Culture Authority. In 2024, he was reappointed director of Misk Art Institute. Mater's works are included in major international collections, such as the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Artistic practice
Mater’s practice is defined by its articulation of persistent tensions between faith and science, tradition and rapid modernisation, the individual body and the collective mass. For him, these are not abstract oppositions but experiential conditions shaped by his dual background as a physician and an artist, as well as by his upbringing at the intersection of Hijazi religious culture and the societal changes brought about by the development of the Saudi oil industry. His work does not seek to resolve these tensions but instead holds them in suspension.
The Illuminations series, initiated in 2008, was responsible for Mater’s rise to international prominence and exemplifies this approach. Discarded hospital X-rays are framed by intricately illuminated Quranic texts, rendered on paper treated with alum powder, pomegranate, and tea, materials traditionally used in manuscript illumination. In the series, the central area that would traditionally be reserved for a geometric pattern is replaced by an X-ray image, positioning the interior of the body in the place traditionally reserved for the sacred. These works question whether the human body, made transparent through clinical technology, can also be interpreted as spiritual. Neither overtly pious nor explicitly critical, the series deliberately maintains multiple interpretations and avoids a definitive stance.
A related and equally significant body of work is the Magnetism series (2009–2024). First exhibited at the 53rd Venice Biennale, in this series, variously realised as a photograph or a sculptural work, a black cube referencing the Ka‘aba is encircled by iron filings arranged in radial patterns by a concealed magnet. The work renders the gravitational pull of Islam’s holiest site as a tangible phenomenon. Functioning simultaneously as a scientific demonstration and as a diagram of collective devotion, the work investigates the interplay between attraction and repulsion, individuality and collectivity, and the measurable and the transcendent.
Developed over five years of sustained fieldwork in Mecca, the Desert of Pharan project (2008–2015) constitutes the most documentary and politically engaged project of Mater’s practice. Utilising photography, video, and installation, the series documents the unprecedented commercial redevelopment of the Masjid Al-Haram and environs, and the erasure of historic architecture produced by the expanding pilgrimage economy. Mater engages with this material not as an outsider or polemicist, but as a Muslim who experienced Mecca as a formative environment. The resulting body of work serves as both an archive of loss and an act of witnessing, contextualising the transformation of the holy city within broader discourses on globalisation, heritage, and the economy of sacred spaces.
In recent years, Mater’s practice has expanded to include land art. The commission Ashab Al-Lal (Mirage), developed over four years for Wadi AlFann in AlUla, furthers his engagement with the Saudi landscape as both subject and medium. A persistent concern emerging across these bodies of work concerns the ongoing transformation of Saudi Arabia and the pressures exerted on its people, landscapes, and traditions, as well as the potential for art to critically address these changes.
