Hayy Jameel, A Little Too Reserved

Two Exhibitions on Movement, Maps, and Memory—and a Visit That Ended Sooner Than Expected

I did not visit Hayy Jameel to test how quickly I could walk.

I went to see art.

There is a difference.

I entered the building in Jeddah and went through the usual procedures. Admission was free, although I was asked to register my name, email address, and some basic personal information before entering.

I have no particular objection to this. Many cultural institutions follow similar procedures. But the small contradiction interested me: even when we do not pay for a ticket, we still leave something of ourselves at the entrance.

Then I walked in.

On the ground floor, an exhibition explored maps, navigation, borders, and movement. Upstairs, another addressed the Red Sea, migration, memory, trade, and pilgrimage.

Two substantial subjects.

Very substantial, in fact.

But by the time I finished my visit, I found myself facing a problem I had not anticipated.

The ground floor could be crossed in approximately three minutes, and the upper floor in another two, provided one moved briskly without stopping to read the accompanying texts.

Five minutes.

Of course, this does not mean that five minutes are sufficient to understand the works. Some deserve considerably more attention, perhaps even a second visit. What interested me was the discrepancy between the intellectual scale of the exhibitions and the speed with which one could physically pass through them.

I left searching for a description that would neither diminish the exhibitions nor flatter the institution hosting them.

Eventually, I settled on two observations.

A beautiful exhibition.

But one that seemed almost reluctant to make its presence felt.

The World Is Larger Than the Gallery

The first exhibition, Global Positioning System, is curated by Indranjan Banerjee and Lucas Morin.

Opened on May 20, 2026, and running until October 26, it forms part of a larger project presented across Art Jameel’s centres in Jeddah and Dubai, featuring more than forty artists across the two locations.

This distinction matters before any judgment is made.

I was not seeing forty artists assembled inside one building. I was seeing the Jeddah chapter of a larger geographical project.

The second exhibition, Red Wind, Coral Worlds, curated by Huda Tayob and Miriam Hillawi Abraham, explores the Red Sea through trade, migration, pilgrimage, memory, and the connections extending between its shores.

What connects the two exhibitions is not simply their location inside the same building.

Both are concerned with movement.

The first asks: how do we know where we are?

The second asks: what remains of us when we leave a place?

For me, this is a promising beginning.

An exhibition does not necessarily need a beautiful subject. It needs a question capable of remaining with the visitor long after leaving.

But possessing a question is one thing.

Turning it into an artistic experience is another.

When the Map Becomes an Instrument of Power

At the entrance to Global Positioning System, introductory texts and graphics establish a strong presence.

Maps.

Dotted lines.

Names.

Routes.

Explanations moving between Arabic and English, introducing the proposition that a map is not an innocent instrument.

We normally use maps to find our way.

But we forget that somebody decided what should appear on them.

Borders are not nature.

Roads are not geography alone.

And the distance suggested by a navigation application is not necessarily the distance understood by someone who actually lives in that place.

This interests me as an architect.

Urban planning itself depends on transforming land into lines.

A line establishes ownership.

Another defines a street.

Another separates one neighbourhood from another.

And another determines whether a person is permitted to cross a particular space.

The map does not merely describe the city.

Sometimes it establishes the conditions under which life in that city becomes possible.

Yet I wanted the exhibition to do more than convince me of this through writing.

I wanted to see how the proposition could become an experience unavailable through simply reading an article on political geography.

That was when I began looking more closely at the works.

Bani Abidi: The Barrier That Temporarily Lost Its Authority

One of the works that held my attention was Bani Abidi’s Security Barriers (Z–M), 2019.

The series comprises fourteen inkjet prints mounted on aluminium composite panels.

The work draws on security barriers found throughout Karachi.

Those objects placed outside embassies, institutions, intersections, and protected buildings, reorganising movement according to considerations that pedestrians rarely have any authority to question.

In the street, a barrier is not an artistic subject.

It is an instruction.

Stop.

Do not cross.

Turn right.

Abidi removes these objects from their surroundings and presents them against clean backgrounds, allowing each barrier to exist as an independent form.

And something interesting happens.

An object originally designed to prevent people from approaching becomes something we are invited to approach.

The work does not remove the authority of the real barrier.

But it temporarily removes that authority from its image.

I appreciate this kind of art because it transforms an ordinary urban element into a question about power without requiring an enormous monument to make the argument.

More importantly, it reminds us that some of the most influential objects in our cities are not the buildings we enjoy photographing.

They are the smaller things that determine where we are allowed to walk.

The Road Between Milan and Turin That Lost Its Direction

Another work is Tiger Tateishi’s Milano, Torino Super way, 1974.

A silkscreen print on paper.

A highway.

Straight lines.

A perspective that should carry the eye toward a distant point.

But the artist interferes with that expectation.

Two competing horizons.

A sky that appears to belong to another world.

And a landscape that becomes less stable the longer the eye attempts to organise it.

The road is among the elements of modern infrastructure in which we place the greatest confidence.

We enter it assuming that it will lead us somewhere specific.

But Tateishi treats the road almost as an unreliable visual promise.

The work dates from 1974, long before people carried phones telling them when to turn and where to stop.

Yet its question feels entirely contemporary.

We have become considerably better at reaching destinations.

But have we become better at understanding the places through which we travel?

This is not simply a problem of GPS.

It is a problem in our relationship with the city, dating back to the moment we began reducing it to routes.

Zarina: Nine Homes and Nine Lines of Memory

Then came the work I found closest to my own experience.

Zarina — Homes I Made / A Life in Nine Lines, 1997.

A portfolio of nine etchings recalling the floor plans of homes the artist inhabited throughout her life.

Bangkok.

Bonn.

Paris.

Tokyo.

New York.

Several homes.

One life.

But Zarina does not reconstruct the rooms as they might have appeared in photographs.

No furniture.

No colours.

No façades.

Only boundaries, thresholds, and lines.

What was once an entire home becomes a floor plan, almost reduced to a trace.

I stopped here because the idea was familiar to me.

Earlier this year, I returned to my archive of old photographs, taken in London and Paris in 2006, to compare those cities with their appearance twenty years later.

I initially believed I was recovering buildings.

Then I realised I was recovering something else.

The person who had once stood behind the camera.

Zarina performs something similar, but through a far greater degree of abstraction.

She does not reconstruct the home in order to return to it.

She reconstructs its geometry because the home itself is no longer available in the way she once inhabited it.

The work becomes more affecting when considered alongside her biography, shaped by the Partition of India in 1947 and the subsequent movements between countries and cultures.

In architecture, we draw a plan because we intend to build.

Here, the plan is drawn because the act of inhabiting has already ended.

The house is no longer a proposal for the future.

It has become evidence of the past.

For me, this was among the strongest ideas in the exhibition.

Ana Amorim: When a Person Becomes Their Own Map

In Ana Amorim’s 2022 work documenting thirty-two days of embroidering mental maps, we move from the memory of domestic space to the recording of everyday movement.

The work documents a routine spanning Italy, Spain, and Mexico, from November 20 to December 21, 2022.

Mercerised cotton thread, hand-embroidered on cotton cloth.

But its significance extends beyond the embroidery.

Since 1989, Amorim has been developing personal systems for recording time and movement.

Counting.

Recording.

Organising.

Transforming the passage of time into data, and then into an artwork.

Standing before the idea, I thought about the technological distance we have travelled.

In the late 1980s, recording the details of human movement could constitute an artistic project in its own right.

Today, a smartphone can document our journeys, routes, and stopping points, provided the relevant tracking services are enabled.

The machine now performs part of what the artist once undertook manually.

But there is an essential difference.

The artist decides what she wishes to preserve.

Navigation systems, meanwhile, collect information in order to perform their functions, with further uses depending on how the system is designed and what permissions have been granted.

The first is an attempt to understand oneself.

The second makes movement computationally legible.

And that is why a small piece of embroidery can raise a question larger than the device in my pocket.

Does documenting my life help me understand it?

Or does it simply make my life easier to measure?

Heba Y. Amin: When the Image Decides to Hide

In Heba Y. Amin’s Encaustic Drawings, 2025, maps, photographs, and surveillance imagery appear beneath layers of pigment and wax.

The artist uses encaustic techniques, involving heated wax, to create translucent surfaces that conceal as much as they reveal.

The works recall the history of military camouflage in Egypt during the Second World War and the visual experiments intended to deceive aerial surveillance.

Here, the function of mapping is reversed once again.

In the previous work, the map was an attempt to understand movement.

Here, the image becomes an instrument for obstructing understanding.

Confusing the eye.

Preventing visibility from automatically becoming knowledge.

This interests me architecturally because we live in an era when documenting space has become extraordinarily easy.

Satellite images.

Cameras.

Drones.

Digital models.

Surveillance systems.

But the ease of looking does not necessarily give us the right to know everything.

Transparency is not always an absolute virtue.

Sometimes concealment is a form of protection.

It is a complicated proposition.

And I think Amin’s work gives it an artistic form worth considering.

Then I Went Upstairs to the Red Sea

The subject changes on the upper floor.

From positioning systems to the Red Sea.

From overland routes to maritime connections.

From technology to memories extending across centuries.

Red Wind, Coral Worlds does not present the Red Sea simply as a body of water separating landmasses, but as a network connecting people.

Trade.

Pilgrimage.

Migration.

Displacement.

Coastal cities.

And the objects travellers carried with them or left behind.

This is an especially appropriate subject for a city such as Jeddah.

The city itself did not develop independently of the sea.

Yet what interested me most in this section was the presence of historical artefacts alongside contemporary artistic discourse.

Among them was a pale basalt tombstone bearing thirteen lines of raised Thuluth script.

Its label places it within a broad historical period between the fifth and ninth centuries AH, corresponding approximately to the eleventh through late fifteenth centuries CE.

The inscription is attributed to Muhammad bin Salih bin Abi Harami Futuh, of the Bani al-Attar tribe.

A small object.

But one carrying material.

Language.

A name.

Death.

And several centuries.

This is different from a map.

A map tells you where you might go.

A tombstone tells you that somebody was once here.

Lived.

Died.

And left a name.

At that moment, geography becomes less abstract.

A city is not made of roads and coastlines alone.

It is also made of people who lived there, died there, and left behind something that allows us to read a fragment of their existence.

The Kaaba on a Rosewater Sprinkler

Another object I photographed was a silver rosewater sprinkler bearing an image of the Kaaba, dated to the period between the 1950s and the 1970s.

A small object, perhaps easily passed over among larger exhibits.

But it has an interesting relationship with the exhibition’s central subject.

The image of a fixed place.

Carried by a movable object.

The Kaaba does not travel.

But its image has travelled through objects people used, preserved, exchanged, and carried with them.

Sometimes these smaller objects interest me more than monumental historical artefacts.

Because history does not reside only in great buildings.

It also resides in what we carry.

A rosewater sprinkler.

A piece of silver.

A box.

A document.

Or a stone bearing someone’s name.

Within an exhibition examining movement across the Red Sea, such objects become material evidence that distance transports more than human bodies.

It also transports images, symbols, and memories.

Where Does the Criticism Begin?

At this point, the reader could reasonably ask me a question.

If these works carry so many ideas, why describe the exhibition as reserved, almost hesitant?

The answer has little to do with the artists’ merits.

Or the importance of the subject.

Or even the number of works alone.

What troubled me was the difference between the scale of the curatorial proposition and the scale of the spatial experience.

The two exhibitions address subjects extending across continents, history, borders, and oceans.

Yet during my visit, the distance between those ideas and their physical presentation felt greater than I had hoped.

I read texts containing expansive propositions.

I encountered works worthy of attention.

But I did not always feel that their arrangement, or the exhibition space itself, created an experience that developed with the same intensity as the written ideas.

In other words:

At times, the text felt fuller than the space.

This is a question of exhibition-making, not a judgment against the artists.

Five Minutes Are Not a Measure of Art

I should clarify something important.

I do not believe the best exhibition is the one that requires two hours.

Nor do I believe an exhibition that can be crossed in five minutes is necessarily less valuable than one that takes an entire day.

A single object can justify a visit.

And one might spend longer before a small work than before an installation filling an entire gallery.

But there is a difference between standing still because a work compels you to stop and having to persuade yourself to remain in order to read its background.

Conceptual art needs texts.

That is understandable.

Sometimes the work cannot be read without knowledge of its political or historical context.

But the accompanying text should open the work.

It should not turn the work into an appendix to the text.

This, I believe, is among the most difficult responsibilities of a curator.

How do you make knowledge available without turning the visit into a reading examination?

Visitors should not be required to have read every reference before entering.

An exhibition should not punish them for arriving without that preparation.

We Do Not Need Another Louvre

I do not want this review to be understood as a demand that Hayy Jameel become a museum the size of the Louvre.

That would be an unfair criticism.

Institutions differ.

Budgets differ.

Collections differ.

And the functions of their spaces differ.

Hayy Jameel is not simply two exhibition galleries. It is a cultural complex containing other activities and spaces. What I am reviewing here is specifically my experience of the two exhibitions at Hayy Arts during this visit.

Nor do I possess information about the exhibitions’ budgets, visitor figures, or production costs, so I will not invent a judgment about their financial or institutional success.

But there is something I can evaluate.

What happened to me as a visitor?

And here I return to my first observation.

I entered two exhibitions dealing with substantial subjects, works from diverse backgrounds, and artists representing different regions and cultures.

I found material worth reading.

But I found the physical experience lighter than expected.

It is not necessary for the presentation to become louder in order to become stronger.

Perhaps the works need a clearer relationship with one another.

Perhaps the space itself could participate more actively in the argument.

Perhaps certain works need greater presence, allowing them to guide the experience rather than remain individual stops along a route.

This is not a call for more visual effects.

Or for filling every wall.

Or for turning an exhibition into entertainment.

It is about allowing the exhibition itself to possess the strength of the ideas it presents.

Admission Was Free. Attention Was Not.

And here I return once again to the entrance.

Admission was free.

That matters.

Removing the financial barrier allows someone to encounter art without calculating the price of a ticket before knowing what they are about to see.

But there is another resource, no less valuable.

Attention.

I gave the exhibition part of my day.

I read some of its texts.

I photographed works and labels.

Then I returned to those photographs to reconsider what I had seen.

That alone demonstrates that the experience was not without value.

Certain ideas remained with me after leaving, particularly those presented by Zarina, Bani Abidi, and Heba Y. Amin.

But the paradox is that a significant portion of my actual engagement with the exhibition happened after I had left it, when I began reading the photographs and labels again.

And this raises a question.

Is that the exhibition’s strength?

Or did the exhibition fail to provide, within its galleries, the psychological time and visual sequence that would allow those ideas to develop before I departed?

Perhaps both explanations contain some truth.

But the distance between them deserves examination.

The Exhibition That Did Not Slow Me Down Enough

I do not want to end with a harsh verdict, because that would be easier than the reading I have attempted here.

There is clear effort in the selection of subjects.

There are works worthy of attention.

And the relationship between contemporary artists and historical materials creates worthwhile possibilities for interpretation.

But I also do not believe an exhibition should receive immunity from criticism simply because it presents itself as part of a serious cultural programme.

The seriousness of an institution does not mean every exhibition it organises achieves the same level of success.

Nor does criticism imply a lack of appreciation.

Quite the opposite.

An institution possessing cultural space, an artistic programme, and both local and international audiences should be capable of accepting a simple question:

Did the exhibition give its ideas the space they deserved?

During my visit, I was not entirely convinced.

And that is why I left with the impression of something beautiful, but held back.

Not necessarily because the art was weak.

But because its presentation sometimes seemed reluctant to occupy the space with the same confidence as the ideas it carried.

Before visiting, I expected to encounter works about maps, the sea, and memory.

And I did.

But I left thinking about something else.

The amount of time an exhibition can persuade a visitor to surrender.

At the Louvre, the density of works sometimes left me searching for somewhere to rest my eyes.

At Hayy Jameel, almost the opposite happened.

I found myself searching for another reason to stay.

That does not mean I needed more works simply to increase the count.

I needed a stronger relationship between the work, the space, and time.

Because an exhibition, like a building, is not measured only by what it contains.

It is measured by what it makes you do while you are inside it.

I left Hayy Jameel carrying photographs, names, and worthwhile ideas, but without the feeling produced by an artistic experience that takes more of your day than you intended to give it.

Perhaps that is my central observation.

The exhibition had much to say about movement.

But it never quite managed to slow mine down.

And that, to me, is what it means for an exhibition to be beautiful…

yet a little too reserved.