![]() “I was lucky because in the late 90s the internet appeared,” he relates. ![]() In fact, it may well have been art that saved the young Gharem. The first thing he remembers thinking, he says, was, “Why wasn’t it me? We had the same education and environment. We had no idea they went to Afghanistan for training.” They disappeared for a while, but we thought maybe they moved to another city. “They were the best at school and from rich families. “They were so smart,” he continues, pausing only for another puff of the Marlboro Red cigarettes he chain-smokes, seated at his desk in front of an impressive library of books on contemporary art. Then they started saying the names of the terrorists, and I realized I went to high school with some of them. Block city wars logo tv#“I was watching TV with my family in Abha,” he recalls over a WhatsApp video call from his home studio in Riyadh, referring to his hometown and the capital of the Asir region in the south of the kingdom. Gharem remembers where he was on that fateful day 21 years ago that made the West much less hospitable to Muslims and migrants in general. The phrase (go home) and the enactments by some countries of laws opposing good hospitality contradicts the concept of ‘universal hospitality.’ For it is not a charitable act, but rather the right of every stranger to not be treated as an enemy.” ![]() 16, will spark a “new cultural dialogue.”Īs he writes in his artist statement, “The West is comforted by the presence of border blockades, assuming that violent incidents do not happen to them, or that they only happen to the faraway others, attempting what is called social sterilization, as in (a society without strangers). The 49-year-old Gharem, a seminal figure in and pioneer of Saudi Arabia’s contemporary art scene, hopes his exhibition Hospitable Thoughts, at the Marc Straus Gallery through Oct. 11, 2001, and the wars and chaos that followed. When acclaimed Saudi artist Abdulnasser Gharem opened his first solo show in New York City last week, it closed the circle on a story that began more than two decades ago on Sept. ![]()
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