Exhibition at Ithra invites Saudis to reflect on the meaning of home - Assalamu Alaikum
Assalamu Alaikum - Ithra is hosting “Echoes of the Familiar,” a new show that looks at what home means for Saudis, running from Oct. 31 to Sept. 1, 2026.
The exhibition isn’t spooky despite opening around Halloween. It asks visitors to think about what makes a Saudi house feel like home. Curator Gaida Al-Mogren, an architect and longtime voice in Saudi contemporary art, told Arab News how the idea grew out of thinking about walls that hold memories - the quiet whispers of a house, the sound of steps on tiles, the small noises that make a place lived-in.
You enter through a bright red door, chosen to echo the shift from traditional wooden doors in mud houses to aluminum doors with colored glass in modern homes, and to connect patterns from Najd, Al-Ahsa and other regions. Before you go in there’s a timeline showing Saudi’s big changes over the last century. Al-Mogren greeted visitors with, “our house is your house.”
The gallery is split into six parts: The Building, The Living Room, The Kitchen, The Hallway of Memories, The Bedroom, and The People of the Home. Each space reimagines household corners as places where personal memory meets shared identity - some pieces will trigger a lived memory, others a nostalgic feeling.
Twenty-eight Saudi artists are included, from different generations and regions - Riyadh, Jeddah, Sharqiya and more - working across many styles and mediums. The show treats domestic life as lived, remembered and imagined, turning private spaces into layered stories.
There are familiar touches from past decades: satellite dishes on rooftops, cassette and VHS tapes, and the small items from a kitchen’s “junk drawer” that people keep because they bring comfort. The exhibition brings together smells, sounds and textures - cardamom, laughter, fingerprints on doorknobs, and rooms that once held faces now absent - and frames hallways as meaningful in-between spaces. It works like a living archive of the 1970s–90s and a meditation on belonging.
Al-Mogren spoke about collaborating with a multigenerational group of artists and how the project sits at the intersection of art, architecture and culture. She also shared her personal story: growing up in Sharqiya, living abroad for years, and the yearning for a steady sense of home when her family moved. Now back in Saudi, she’s focused on creating rituals and memories for her children - and her kids’ view is simple and sweet: home is where you are, mama.
If you’re interested in Saudi home life explored through contemporary art, this exhibition sounds like a meaningful, relatable experience - welcome, and enjoy.
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