Contemporary artist's works explore ever-evolving Saudi Arabia

The title piece Antenna is inspired by Mater's childhood memories of climbing onto the roof of his family's house to lift a battered TV antenna to the evening sky.

"The antenna carries unique symbolic significance throughout both my upbringing and artistic career," he says. Moving the antenna to find a signal beyond the mountainous horizon made him feel like a young explorer searching for contact with the outside world.

"Like many of my generation in Saudi Arabia, I was seeking ideas, music, poetry — a glimpse of a different kind of life. This spirit of creative exploration, curiosity, and reaching out to communicate across the borders surrounding me have defined my journey as an artist," Mater says.

Walking to the third floor, visitors will find more installations and large projects. The Lightning Land project was inspired by fulgurites, a glass tube formed by sand struck by lightning, which causes the sand to melt and then rapidly vitrify, forming irregular elongated shapes resembling petrified lightning. Mater found in the immense and unpredictable force of nature a metaphor for the forces driving Saudi Arabia's changes. He used high-voltage power generation to simulate flashes of lightning to create a series of sculptures.

The UCCA also presents a miniature replica of a project he created in 2022 called Ashab Al-Lal, a large-scale site-specific land art installation located in the Valley of the Arts in the northwest of Saudi Arabia.

Studying the formation of a mirage, a natural phenomenon that appears in the desert, Mater simulated the bending of light rays. When visitors descend a tunnel into a subterranean chamber in the 65-square-kilometer valley, people walking in the faraway desert will see their apparition in mirage.

In some of the other cultures in the world, people consider the mirage as an unrealistic illusion that is deceiving and disappointing, but in his culture, the mirage is a traveler's guide and a picture of hope, Mater tells the media.

Mater's works have been featured in prestigious institutions around the world, such as The British Museum in London, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and the Guggenheim in New York. His art has also joined the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum in the United Kingdom, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the United States, and the Centre Pompidou in France.

If you go

Ahmed Mater: Antenna

10 am to 7 pm (final entry 6:30 pm), March 8 to June 8

UCCA Edge, 2F, 88 Xizang Road North, Jing'an district, Shanghai 021-66286861