Arab News | Highlights from new-media showcase ‘Continuum ’26’ in Diriyah

RIYADH: ‘Echoes of the Unseen’

Harpreet Sareen

NYC-based artist Sareen’s piece “explores captivity as one of the oldest and most familiar arrangements through which humans organize relationships with other species,” according to the show notes. The work examines the ethics of those relationships, questioning whether the cage that “confines a parakeet in a Hyderabad living room or a finch in a Brooklyn pet shop” — usually seen as “care, as ornament, as commerce, as inheritance,” or as something more violent and transgressive. Rather than an image — “which can be looked away from” — Sareen addresses this question “through an embodied act of attention that the visitor must construct, hold, and eventually choose to release.”

 

‘The Farm’

Foreseen Agency

Foreseen Agency is artist duo Kachi Chan and Shan Wong. Here they present an artwork comprising 18 one-meter data stacks, each hosting a fragmented human body across six screens. “Head, torso, and limbs are distributed and isolated; no single screen presents a complete figure,” the notes state. “The body exists only as a dispersed system, split across surfaces and synchronized through motion. Arranged concentrically into a monolithic tower, the installation strikes the viewer, producing a field of synchronized yet disjointed movement.”

 

‘Suspended Memory’

Fai Ahmed

Ahmed’s work — consisting of a desk surrounded by large-scale projections of shifting digital landscapes reminiscent of an old-school video game — is intended to question how “we hold what was never written down, recorded, or formally preserved — the small rituals, the unknown events, the fragments that disappear without leaving an institutional trace,” according to the notes. “Oral storytelling has long been a primary form of archiving: fluid, situated, and very dependent on human connection. Yet every act of archiving is also an act of selection. Memory operates the same way. It doesn’t preserve; it selects, distorts, forgets, and reshapes.” 

 

‘The Time That Remains’

Omar Adel

Adel’s single-channel video installation is part of the artist’s larger research project focusing on the end of time as a catalyst for sociopolitical transformation. This piece, according to the notes, “begins from a consideration of the human condition historically sedimented. The project asks what forms of consciousness emerge in places undergoing rapid transformation, where social, economic, and cultural change unfold faster than they can be collectively absorbed.”