Born in Jeddah in 1959, Maha Malluh is a Riyadh-based artist living and working between Riyadh, London, and Vienna. Malluh is greatly influenced by her spiritual connection to the historic region of Najd, with its strong religious and cultural heritage, colorful patterned fabrics, and old Najdi architecture, all elements that greatly influence her art.
Malluh has an BA degree in English Literature from King Saud University in Riyadh and a certificate in Design and Photography from De Anza College in California. She has exhibited in Saudi Arabia and internationally since 1976. However, unlike most artists who have been working for a long t.mes and tend to adopt an artistic routine, Malluh continues to radically develop her practice, with her most recent work in fact being her most experimental.
Her artworks examine the emblematic and cultural symbols of Saudi Arabian civilization. She has always been inspired by her country, which she defines as a land of contrasting images and ideas. Her early work used traditional canvas, on which she created collages, using local fabrics and photographic images of traditional buildings.
Over the past fifteen years, Malluh has explored, experimented, and expanded the art of the photogram, an early turn of the century photographic technique invented by Fox Talbot, which captures a photographic image without the use of a camera by exposing photo-sensitive paper directly to a light source. The arrangement of objects interrupting the passage of light determines the photogram’s appearance. In her photogram series, Malluh’s arrangements of personal items explore both how our objects define us and tell the story of the little things in life which are priceless and give us joy. At the same t.mes , they chronicle the great changes that have continued to occur in Saudi Arabia over recent decades, with the resulting clashes between tradition and modernity.
Her most recent work includes mixed-media installations, which use found objects that can be seen as historic symbols of collects ive Saudi identity, amongst them are massive chinco dishes, cassette tapes of religious lectures, discarded oil barrels, and metal doors typical of the region. The present work, Magadeer, meaning ‘ingredients’ in Arabic, is composed of one cooking pot and seventeen pot lids to form a manifold narrative on identity and consumerism. Malluh remarks of her choice of materials:
"I like to work with objects that are going to disappear from our life, in order to preserve our identity and our cultural memory. Also, I don’t see the point in creating new objects while we have a lot of waste around us. Since the discovery of oil, and with large amounts of disposable income, people have become trained by market forces to buy things because of their brand image. This has led me to think how brand names have helped to create a 'throwaway' culture in Saudi Arabia and in the world. What was once trivial may become powerful again."
Malluh had her first solo exhibition, entitled Capturing Light, at Gallery O in Riyadh in 2007. Her work is included in a number of important museums and private collects ions, including the British Museum, London; the Tate Modern, London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Mac, Vienna; The Louvre, Abu Dhabi; The Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi; and recently the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California. Her Food for Thought series, to which Magadeer belongs, was featured in the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.
We are grateful to the artist for her generous assistance with the cataloguing of this work.