Diriyah Art Futures, the first new media arts hub in the MENA region, has announced its second major exhibition titled Maknana: An Archaeology of New Media Art in the Arab World.
Co-curated by artists and curators Haytham Nawar and Ala Younis, the exhibition will run from April 21 to July 19 at DAF at Diriyah, Riyadh.
Bringing together works by more than 40 artists from the MENA region, the exhibition features pioneering voices from across the region who have embraced and redefined technology as a medium for creative expression.
The exhibition includes notable Saudi artists such as Ahmed Mater, Muhannad Shono, and ARC (Abdullah Rashed), whose practices reflect the Kingdom’s dynamic and evolving relationship with new media.
They are joined by influential artists from across the region such as VJ Um Amel (Laila Shereen Sakr, Egypt); Emily Jacir (Palestine); Akram Zaatari (Lebanon), Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar (Egypt), Hassan Meer (Oman), Hicham Berrada (Morocco/France), Mona Hatoum (Palestine), Walid Raad (Palestine) and Farah Al-Qasimi (UAE).
Spanning decades and disciplines, from early video art and experimental film to generative systems and expanded media, Maknana offers a rare survey of how Arab artists have engaged with and reimagined the digital landscape on their own terms.
The Arabic term ‘Maknana,’ translated as automation, inspires the exhibition’s central inquiry: how Arab artists have navigated, repurposed, and challenged technologies to shape their own creative vocabularies.
The exhibition is structured across four thematic sections, Automation, Autonomy, Ripples, and Glitch, that trace recurring artistic concerns and gestures across different generations, geographies, and technological paradigms.
Highlighting a dynamic constellation of artistic practices, Maknana includes rare archival works, recent digital experiments, and new commissions from artists working across the region and diaspora.
Their works engage with urgent sociopolitical contexts, from networked resistance and machine logic to memory preservation, speculative ecologies, and glitch aesthetics.
In tandem with the exhibition, Diriyah Art Futures will present a public program of talks, performances, screenings, and workshops, expanding on the themes of Maknana and offering visitors direct engagement with artists and thought leaders in the field of new media art.
