A Look Inside Saudi Arabia’s Future, with Co-Founder of Athr Gallery

Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a new ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.

It’s impossible to tell the story of the contemporary art scene in Saudi Arabia without talking about Athr Gallery.

Founded in Jeddah in 2009 by Mohammed Hafiz and Hamsa Serafi, Athr has since grown to multiple locations and a foundation that awards grants and residencies, and hosts programming like the Young Saudi Artists series of exhibitions. Hafiz and Serafi, along with grassroots efforts of patrons and collectors, laid the foundation of the art scene before, in 2018, a newly formed Ministry of Culture stepped in to take it to the next level.

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Earlier this month, ARTnews sat down with Hafiz at the Athr Foundation in Riyadh. It was a busy time: the Ministry of Culture was hosting the first annual Art Week Riyadh, which Athr was participating in, and just days later Hafiz would leave for Art Dubai, the region’s top art fair. Hafiz spoke extensively about the Saudi art scene’s past and its increasingly robust future.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.

ARTnews: What was the art scene like in Saudi Arabia when you cofounded Athr in 2009?

Mohammed Hafiz: Everyone asks this, and I don’t like versions of this question that assume that everything started in 2009. When I answer this kind of question, I want to position it in a way that is interesting and fair to those who have never been to Saudi Arabia.

I’d never been to Saudi before 2023, but I’ve been to the United Arab Emirates many times, starting in 2008, when I saw the models for the museums on Saadiyat Island. I visited Abu Dhabi again the following year because the government had taken over the Abu Dhabi Art Fair. A lot of major galleries, like Pace and Gagosian, exhibited at the fair for the first time. There was suddenly all this interest in the region.

I was in a panel once about the art market and sitting next to me was a gallerist who used to work at an auction house. He started at this auction house when they first came to the region—to Dubai—in 2008 or 2009. He was saying, “We came and we started talking to people in Dubai, and they were like, ‘What’s an auction? ‘ Oh, my God. We were introducing them to the concept of buying art and auction houses.” I was sitting there thinking, I remember my parents receiving auction catalogs when I was in primary school. They would sit together on a couch, looking at watches and pens and antiquities and deciding to bid on some of them.

The only difference between then and now is that the catalogues are no longer on paper, they’re online.

I remember a section in our house where all these catalogs were stacked next to each other … I thought –about this person on the panel–What are you talking about? Sure, maybe in certain parts of the world, people won’t know what Sotheby’s or Christie’s are. But not here. I personally bought my first artwork when I was in high school. That was my first encounter with art. I saw an artwork that I loved in a gallery in Jeddah, and I spoke to the shopkeeper—as you might call him at the time—and he introduced me to the owner of the gallery.

Was this a new artwork or a historical work?

A new artwork by a still-living artist. I paid for it over a year of installments. I’m very proud of that work, which I still own. This was the nineties, and there were art galleries here. Art was always around, in many shapes and forms. Whether it’s in what we now call craft, or the work of artisans. There is Al-Qatt Al-Asiri, the wall paintings painted by women, where the wife would choose their wall in the house and paint this geometric, very colorful mural. And this existed for a very long time, it’s now recognized by UNESCO. So art existed, creativity existed.

Just this morning, I was reading about the Muʻallaqāt —the series of pre-Islamic, Arabic poems written in the 8th century.

In 2009, when Hamsa and I started the gallery, art sparked our interest. We saw a market that was getting shaped and becoming more organized. You would hear about what Doha was doing with the museums. You would hear about Saadiyat [Island in Abu Dhabi]. I had visited Art Dubai in 2008 and I thought, this could be an opportunity. I know that there are galleries back home. I know there are artists, but none of them are here in this fair. Why? Maybe a business model is lacking, or something that requires some organization or strategy or forward-thinking. I thought about how all the points connect to each other: the curator, the institution, the collector, the patron, the non-profit. All of these different points started to make sense, and I saw the relevance of each of those points, and how you could build a market and build a career for an artist. I thought, how does a market progress? And what are the steps that have to be gone through to progress? And I came back and decided to open the gallery.

What was that like?

It was not easy, because we decided from day one to act like the artists’ advisors—to work very closely with a small number of artists … Mostly Saudi artists. We’ve since gone through phases, showing regional [artists], international [artists], then back to focusing on Saudi [artists]. Now we’re expanding the roster. But we learned everything on the job. There were no local benchmarks. We saw the European galleries. We started to engage with them, and we decided to be very flexible and agile, and experiment with anything and everything until we figured out how we wanted to operate, what we want to look at, what we want to look like. And that took us through different phases, from focusing on fewer artists and really creating impact for them, to doing a lot of educational initiatives, workshops, talks, getting professors from different universities to come and do lectures. We found ourselves doing a lot of nonprofit activities, sending artists to residencies, creating different initiatives within the gallery activities, because there was a big void.

It was an evolution.

The way I see the evolution of the scene in Saudi is that there are some very important, pivotal moments. Edge of Arabia [an independent arts initiative introducing contemporary Arab art globally] was a very important moment. The Saudi Art Council, which I was the vice chair of, and our activities, like 21,39 Jeddah Arts [a curated annual exhibition of Saudi artists]. The creation of the Ministry of Culture in 2018 is another pivotal moment. You can see the shifts in the local and international interest in each of these moments.

There used to be an art fair in Saudi, the Shara Art Fair in Jeddah, which came out of the Art Council’s activities. Can you tell me more about that?

The Shara Art fair was born in 2015 from our responses to what was happening in the art world and the need in the market. I should say, I always find it fascinating that in life, and especially in the art world, people can experience the same moment but process it differently and have different views. But this is how I processed it: In 2008, the Edge of Arabia team—Stephen Stapleton and Ahmed Mater—came to me and Hamsa, and said, ‘We want to do an exhibition in London, at the Brunei gallery [at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)], the first exhibition of contemporary Saudi art, and we’re looking for sponsors.’ Hamsa and I decided to sponsor the exhibition, and we went to the opening. This was one of the very big realizations that I had in my journey with the art world. The opening was explosive. Thousands of people came through the door. In London! We had a nice marketing budget, so we had adverts in the tube. And I’m thinking, I paid only $15,000 to sponsor this thing, and every daily publication in the UK is talking about it, saying “groundbreaking” and this and that.

That’s a pretty good return on your investment.

It was unbelievable! I realized, if you position art in the right way, it has a very loud voice, especially because people are always looking for something new. And if you’re the something new, you’re getting some prime space in media. In the day or two after the opening we decided we had to open the gallery.

And Edge of Arabia traveled.

Yes. To Berlin, Istanbul, Venice, Dubai, and, then in 2012, it came here, to Jeddah, with a show called “We Have to Talk,” which I co-curated.

What was the reaction in the Kingdom?

So positive. We invited a group of friends and curators and directors from around the world, and journalists as well. Christie’s was a sponsor. The city was vibing. Everyone was excited. So we thought, we should do this every year. Why not? Let’s do an exhibition called “21,39,” with locals, internationals, invite them, and that’s how the Saudi Art Council started to repeat, annually, what happened with that Edge of Arabia show. The Council members were all very close. The Princess [Jawaher bint Majid Al Saud] was a big patron of the arts in Jeddah. So we spoke to her about it. She was like, I love the idea. Let’s go ahead and do it. We found the space. There was this shopping mall that was struggling to lease their spaces. We went to them and said, we want to lease this space. And we think that that will attract other things. The owner said yes. Then it was time to find sponsors. And no one would sponsor it. No one knew what to expect, but we said, “You’re going to have your clients coming, you’re get some media mileage from it. We’re doing this gala dinner with a lot of important people. So if you have a product or service to sell them, this is the place to be.”

You got no takers?

No. For the first year, we came up with a program—$12,000 per couple to be a supporter. There were 12 or 13 of us members in the Council, so each of us turned to our Rolodex and called all our friends.

Locally?

Yes. These were all locals, and we managed to get about 40 couples: collectors, patrons, friends who felt sorry for us. And we put together our first 21,39 exhibition, curated by Raneem Farsi, and had an amazing opening and dinner. In future years, we had UBS come on board, and Van Cleef & Arpels came next. The director of UBS Middle East came to the opening of the first edition, because more than half of the council members bank with him.

So 21,39 was off the ground. Did the Shara Art Fair come out of this?

Yes. We had the space in the mall. Very nice, reasonably lit. We were using it for four months for 21,39 and then it was empty the rest of time. We had a Council meeting to discuss that and we decided to bring galleries, give them spaces, charge a small rent to offset our rent, and create another moment in the calendar. We targeted it one hundred percent at locals. We didn’t invite anyone internationally to come and see it—curators, museum directors, journalists. It was seven galleries showing what they wanted to sell for 10 days.

International galleries eventually came.

By the last edition [in 2021], we had two or three international galleries. One of the biggest components of the art fair, though, was the silent auction. The [Al-Mansouria Foundation, established by Princess Jawaher] is very active in the scene and the Princess is a very interesting, serious patron. She suggested that we use this moment to raise funds for the Council, because we don’t want to keep struggling every year. What if UBS walked away? Her foundation called artists and asked them to either give work for the silent auction, and it was up to each artist how much of the sale price they would give to the foundation. The artists loved her so much—she’d bought their work and made their careers—so they would give the most beautiful, valuable works for that auction. Bidders would have to come every day if they really liked the work to follow up on the auction.

Shara ended.

In Arabic, we have a saying, everything has it’s time.

It’s also in the Bible: To everything, there is a season.

Meaning, it’s relevant until it’s not. Edge of Arabia had a run of years, and many amazing exhibitions, but it did its job, and everyone around the Edge of Arabia [went on to something else]. I did too.

Let’s talk about Saudi today. With Art Week this month, Riyadh feels really active. There is the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale every two years. Athr is going to be opening a permanent space in Riyadh, and we are sitting in the building for your foundation. This is perhaps a naive comparison but is Jeddah a bit like Dubai and Riyadh a bit like Abu Dhabi?

Jeddah is probably more of a Dubai, or a Cape Town, where it’s not the capital, so it’s a bit more cosmopolitan. A touristic city. Religious tourism is big there. Tens of millions of pilgrims a year, and 80 percent of them pass through Jeddah. Riyadh is the bigger city. It’s a richer city. People have more disposable income than in Jeddah. This is where the collectors are, and where they will be.

The collector and patron Basma al Suleiman was reminding me yesterday that something like 70 percent of the Saudi population is under 35.

She was a Council member. It’s interesting how the art world structures itself, because how many collectors do you need to constitute a market? Not as many as Zara needs as clients! It’s a very small number, and committed collectors can really make an impact on many artists careers, but you also want that wider interest and people who buy art. But then comes the question: who’s a collector? Who’s not a collector? I get this question sometimes from buyers—I won’t call them collectors—”Is this a good investment?” Well, it’s not a Rothko. The artist is in their mid-30s. There’s no way this could be a good investment.

That’s what you should tell them.

That’s what I tell them. You’re driving a Mercedes. Maybe you paid $200,000 for it, a very bad investment. You’re paying $15,000 [for this artwork] and you want me to tell you if it’s a good investment or not.

That’s not just in Saudi.

When I was at Art Dubai in 2008, I was walking around with a dealer from a very large international gallery. She pointed out an artwork by a prominent contemporary artist and said, how much would you pay for it? I tell her, maybe $150,000, and she laughs a little bit and says, it’s going for £1.3 million. It was a very interesting moment for me to think about how value can be created.

When I was at the press conference for Art Week Riyadh and heard the title of the talks program, “How to Art World: Lessons in Value,” I couldn’t help but think about Arthur Danto’s 1964 essay “The Art World,” where he uses that phrase to describe something that, at the time, was new. He was writing about Warhol’s Brillo Box, which, of course, looked exactly like an ordinary Brillo Box, and he writes that in order for the Warhol Brillo Box to be an artwork, there needs to be a select group of arts professionals associated with a select group of arts institutions—“the Art World”—that has the power to designate it art. And hence, the art world: born in New York, 1964. The title of the talks program seems to ask the question: Does every art scene need to conform to the global art scene, which I think is probably the one Danto invented, now embellished with art fairs and biennials and so forth. What I mean is, does every art world have to correspond to this thing that was invented in America that, after that, took a similar form in Europe?

I think the art world in Saudi Arabia and the region is still being defined. We have the Ministry of Culture. The acquisition of artworks, the building of museums. We have Dina Amin [head of the Visual Arts Commission], we have myself and my partner in the gallery. You need the dealer, the curator, the institution. Then you have an ecology that can define what’s an artwork and attach the value, and then someone will buy it and trade it and keep it. This is not quite happening yet.

Where are we in that cycle?

I first engaged with the art world in 2008 without any formal education or knowledge. I still always think that my assumptions are incomplete. They’re missing a lot of data points. But if you do have all those data points, you are forced to conform. If you are missing information, then you have space to experiment. You’ll make up your own thing. Speaking on behalf of our gallery, our foundation, and all of the things we do, we’re embracing our lack of knowledge, and experimenting, in different ways, with different things.

Tell me more about the Athr foundation. When did you start it?

When we started the gallery, we were doing everything could afford to that was within what we understood as the art world. We had the gallery, we did lectures, we ran the Saudi Art Council, and the 21,39 exhibition as part of that. We sponsored Edge of Arabia and sent artists to residencies and did an exhibition called Young Saudi Artists—YSA, playing on YBA [Young British Artists]—and discovered amazing artists there. We lost money on most of these [initiatives]. We thought, why not move the money-losing things into a foundation? Three or so years ago, we created it, worked closely with the Ministry of Culture. The foundation is super agile. Things in the Saudi art world are now becoming a lot more structured and activated, and there’s a lot of opportunities. How do we capture these opportunities? The gallery remains the gallery. We want to really focus on that doing its thing. We want to be one of the world-class galleries. We now have four spaces. We want to expand our roster with both regional and international artists. We have a very good team. And then I thought, well, this ecosystem has to grow and mature, and there are some things that are needed. One of them is logistics and storage. Why not partner with a logistics company and provide these services? So we partnered with a German company called Hasencamp, and we provide services—shipping and storage—for the Saudi art market. We’re looking for other verticals–

Here, you’re talking about for profit.

Yes, and that has to sit at an arm’s length from the nonprofit, the foundation, and we are figuring out how the foundation will evolve. We have a few programs within it. We have an artist residency in Jeddah. We have this building. We have a grants program for selling editions, and we have the Young Saudi Artists exhibition. These are the main programs of the foundation. And we’re looking at a prize and some other things in the future.

Who does the fundraising?

For now, it has to be me, because it would have to evolve further before you can have a person going out into the world and trying to get money. It’s not easy. It will take time until we figure out, like we did with 21,39, when we started that first deal with the family support package. Then we evolved into UBS, Van Cleef, the Ministry of Culture. I’m still trying to figure out how to start building that momentum and how to engage with the public.

You wear a lot of hats, then.

In the art world, I’m finding difficulty—and a lot of the people I know are finding difficulty—in labeling myself. Who are you? Are you a dealer? Are you a philanthropist? Are you a collector? Are you a patron? Are you a shipper? Are you the logistics guy? To go back to your question about how will this scene evolve, I don’t know. When a scene is evolving people wear a lot of hats, and I don’t want to limit my opportunities. In many encounters, people ask me, what do you see five years from now?

I’m glad I didn’t have to ask it.

How the hell would I know? I don’t want to think about that, because the more I think about it, the more limitations I’m putting on it. And I don’t want to do that, because in the scene and the market, I want to be “all of the above.” I’m considering a kunsthalle as part of the foundation, a nice, small space that curates and puts up exhibitions. Why not? I don’t want it to be a collecting institution. Can I find the money for it? Can I find the space for it? If I do, I’m going to do it.

In Jeddah or Riyadh?

It depends on what’s right. In Jeddah, our foundation has an artist residency program. In Riyadh, I have this building. A lot is happening in JAX [a creative hub in a former industrial site in Diriyah, a suburb of Riyadh [where a lot of Art Week is taking place].

You have a temporary location for the gallery in JAX during Art Week, but are soon to open a permanent one. The building we are sitting in now, right around the corner from JAX, is the Athr Foundation’s building. Tell me how this building came about.

Yes, with the gallery, we will be moving to a permanent location within JAX. For this building, we thought, some artists won’t want a JAX warehouse, with all the noise. Some artists or creators can’t afford those warehouses. They don’t want to maintain a big space. And some want to live near their warehouse [studio]. We have leased this building for ten years. Ten units. I spent some money to make it look nice. The foundation has an office and I have nine tenants. Some are artist studios. One is a silk screen printing studio. Another is a graphic designer. Two artists live here where they’ve split the apartment into a living space and a work space. Some of my staff lives here too. The building makes enough money to pay two salaries for the foundation. We held one of our YSA exhibitions here, coinciding with the [the Diriyah Biennial] because we had six empty flats that were between tenants. So we said, let’s do a show, because we are right near JAX. We wanted to do something coinciding with Art Week this week, but we’re fully leased. Maybe next year.

Let’s talk about challenges.

One of the biggest challenges we’re facing now is losing our artists to bigger galleries. The artists want to evolve, they want to grow. They want more exposure, they want more reach. And I’m not against that.

Would you consider expanding internationally?

We’re very open to that.

And when you say that, do you mean regionally or beyond?

[Right now] I’m thinking about regionally, and leaning towards Abu Dhabi. I was very impressed by the most recent edition of the fair and the number of locals who came and engaged. I think they’ve laid down very, strong foundations.

The Guggenheim is opening this year

And there’s the Zayed National Museum, and teamLab is opening. There’s a lot of action there. We’re looking at Abu Dhabi first, and then maybe a European location, maybe Madrid. Could be Paris, could be London. I don’t know. It depends on when the time is right, and what is the best fit.