Abdullah Al Othman KSA, b. 1985

Born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 1985, Abdullah Al Othman is a conceptual artist and researcher.

Al Othman’s interdisciplinary practice is rooted in his experience of living and working in Saudi Arabia, a place of long-lasting civilisation and rich history. His work is characterised by the amalgamation of traditional motifs with more recent, and particularly Western, influences on Saudi Arabian culture, urbanism, and everyday life, often juxtaposing contrasting concepts such as desert and city, vernacular architecture and Western consumerism, or intangible cultural heritage and everyday objects.

Through his practice, Al Othman explores humans’ relationships with their natural and man-made surroundings, both throughout history and in the present. Driven by a belief in the power of art as a tool for human learning and self-improvement, his work is informed by in-depth research into a variety of subjects such as physics, history, culture, architecture, urbanism, anthropology, and sociology. Each of his pieces is centred around a specific narrative, either pre-existing or developed by the artist himself, which he uses as a method to analyse the human experience, employing the practice of storytelling as a vessel for understanding and growth. A key characteristic of Al Othman’s work is the interplay between reality and illusion through the creation of seemingly realistic, close-to-life scenarios, which upon closer inspection reveal themselves as fiction or myth.

Working across a variety of media, Al Othman is particularly interested in light, both as a physical entity and as a symbol of modernity, often including materials such as chrome, stainless steel, or neon lights to emulate natural phenomena or to reproduce modern day uses of light in contemporary design or architecture.