Sultan bin Fahad works with painting and sculpture. A self-taught artist, bin Fahad’s imposing abstract paintings are made with thick strokes of paint, sand, pearl, mica flakes, and powdered glass. Inspired by spirituality as well as the material culture of Mecca in his native Saudi Arabia, this line of inquiry has inspired bin Fahad to imagine his own language for a contemporary yet critical Islamic art. Themes central to his artistic practice revolve around repetition, sound and movement, using symbols that derive from Islam: the five daily prayers, Hajj (pilgrimage) and the Kaaba. Over the last five years, bin Fahad has been collecting discarded archaeological objects from Mecca, and Directions is a new work from this collection. The artist sent eight marble prayer compasses appropriated from Mecca to Palestine, in a gesture in which these discarded objects from one holy place find an anchoring in another. The artefacts are relocated and arranged in a circular manner, with a piece of Palestinian marble carved in a compass’s central star shape, in turn repurposing the objects to become a compass that points in all directions. Directions, 2017. Marble, varying dimensions.
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