The Future is Unwritten: Ahmed Mater, Desert of Pharan

Innovation and a New Future

In the city of Mecca, a new future is being constructed. Its contours are becoming visible amidst a landscape teeming with initiatives – from the most public to the most private – aimed at developing and reinventing seemingly fixed rituals, states and assumptions; culminating, perhaps, in the re-imagining of life at the centre of the Islamic world.

A New Landscape

Earlier images of Mecca often depicted the Kaaba surrounded by the low colonnades of the Great Mosque’s main sanctuary and nestled in the folds of mountainous terrain. Today, Mecca has been changed beyond recognition due to the largest transformation in its history.

The Ka’aba stands at the centre of a brightly lit construction zone as workers erect a massive extension of the mosque and other amenities to accommodate a growing influx of pilgrims. The gleaming Makkah Royal Clock Tower complex, with its luxury hotels, shopping mall, residences, and prayer room, dominates the horizon.

Mecca makes the vast majority of its income during the Hajj, when travel agencies (such as the one pictured here), guides and merchants cater to the dramatic increase in pilgrim numbers, which have grown from roughly 200,000 in the 1970s to 3 million in 2016.

‘Beacon in the Holy City’ Billboard on the road to Mecca.

Entry to the sacred city is exclusively granted to the followers of Islam. The pilgrimage remains the central structuring principle – both symbolically and physically – of all that is Mecca. The rituals of the pilgrimage have been fiercely protected, and devotedly and consistently observed for fifteen centuries.

About three miles beyond the Shumaisi checkpoint, where Muslims are separated from non-Muslims, stands the Mecca Gate, which features a monumental sculpture of the Qur’an made by artist Dia Aziz Dia in 1975.

A construction worker named Jibreel stands atop the highest minaret, one of the six towers used to call Muslims to prayer at the Grand Mosque, during its expansion. The developments throughout Mecca are immense, their ambitions signaled by a frenetic mass of cranes and bulldozers. The landscape of the holy city teems with skyscrapers; cranes and artificial lights clutter the skyline. Even the Ka‘aba is encroached upon, jostled among buildings that vie for space as the Mecca Royal Clock Tower, with its colossal crescent moon, rises above all.

“I flew in a helicopter over the new hotel complex built near the Grand Mosque. The seven towers of the Abraj Al-Bait are massive, casting their shadows over the whole city; looming and dominant, they dwarf everything around them. The Clock Tower, at 1,972 feet (601 meters), is the third-tallest building in the world and includes a mall that occupies twenty floors.

The complex is situated on the former location of the old Turkish fortress known as the Jiyad Fort. Seeing it lit like this, with neon in the early evening light, feels like looking at the future – it’s hard to imagine the many layers of time, of histories, that were until recently all here.”

“In Mecca, difference becomes the only constant. Today is different from yesterday and, by tomorrow, it will have altered again. There are seismic changes that stagger even the casual observer – the massive development of the Haram Al-Sharif being the most iconic. It’s a place loaded with historical significance, yet there isn’t any infrastructure left there that is more than 100 years old. It amazes me that for so many around the world today, especially non-Muslims who do not know the significance of the city, Mecca has become synonymous with impossibly tall buildings, the looming clock tower and the teeming cranes. What happens to the symbolic identity when the physicality is altered beyond recognition? The ‘difference’ between the potent invested symbolism of the place and the complete physical transformation is the most charged – how can it be so historically, religiously, symbolically robust while also being physically obliterated and changed beyond recognition?” - Ahmed Mater

The bridge of passage to Mina is where one of the rites of the pilgrimage take place, the stoning of the Jamarat. This place has been transformed utterly in the past few decades, with these massive new bridges constructed to carry the ever-expanding number of pilgrims. Mecca faces an unprecedented yet abundantly practical problem: how to accommodate the massive, ever-growing transient population of hajj pilgrims? Their number during the week of the hajj has grown exponentially, from between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand pilgrims in the 1970s to more than three million people today – and would be ten times that size without government-imposed regulations.

High above the entrance to the Jimarat, we can sense both the significance of this rite and the considerable risk posed by the overwhelming mass of people funnelling in. Hundreds have died trying to make their way across Jamarat Bridge.

Moving east to west, pilgrims re-enact Abraham’s hajj by throwing seven pebbles against each of three pillars, known collectively as Jamarat. The area around the Jamarat pillars, located in an encampment east of Mecca, has been redesigned repeatedly to facilitate pilgrims’ progression during the stone-throwing ritual.

The week of the hajj is the busiest time of the year in Mecca and when the commercial stores facing the main entrance of the Grand Mosque make the majority of their earnings.

This is one of the earlier photos from the collection, a route to the narrative history of the old neighbourhoods and settlements that no longer exist, demolished to clear the way for the expansion of the mosque and the construction of new hotels.

As the sketched outline of a new city is overlaid onto the demolished infrastructure of the past, the older city is eradicated. The city is recast, dominated by a more technologically advanced, materialist, consumer-driven understanding of urban space. What is not yet clear is the impact this will have on the emotional and psychological well-being of the inhabitants of the physical and symbolic city.

Children playing in the Burmese area of Mecca.

Children on their way to religious class in one of the outer neighbourhoods of Mecca.

A neighborhood that has since been demolished as part of the continued expansion.

Building accommodations for pilgrims has dominated the infrastructure changes transforming Mecca’s landscape. There are now more than a hundred hotels, many built right around the Ka‘aba. These are the most luxurious, their rates reflecting their proximity, lavish facilities, and furnishings. Here, rooms cost up to $3,000 a night. Few can afford or justify such expense, although there are extremely wealthy pilgrims who have booked rooms for every night of the year, even though they will stay for only a week.

Workers stand before a hoarding showing the plan for the restoration of the Grand Mosque area. Besides the millions of pilgrims that visit annually, Mecca is home to more than a million inhabitants, making it the third-most populous city in Saudi Arabia. It also has a long history as a site for domestic trade. Here is one of the many billboards in the older city that mask construction sites. Dreams surround this city, a belief that Utopia can be created here. Yet time and again, as with every age of renovation, we live within a reality of drills, demolition, and destruction.

With the growing religious tourism industry, hotel rooms in the Makkah Royal Clock Tower complex have come to dominate the skyline above the Great Mosque’s main sanctuary. Here, inside the quiet luxury of a private room, Mater’s framing becomes a subtle commentary on how political and spatial changes are reinventing the center of the Islamic world.

Pilgrims inside tents on Mount Arafat.

This aerial photograph was taken from a helicopter flying above the Holy City of Makkah. This work is part of a wider project called Desert of Pharan, which explores the current transformation of one of the most visited yet exclusive cities on earth.

Mass, and more specifically scale, are important to the project. Most obviously, the swarming mass of pilgrims that come each year, like a wave, to the city – but also the scale of the individual human body in relation to the urban – and how this speaks of the scale of one life among the multitude of lives, stories and unofficial histories. There are interior scenes and aerial shots, images of vast echoing construction sites and crowds thronging holy sites. More than being merely read as a commentary on Islam, or religious experience, the ranging ideas prompted by Desert of Pharan engage with a global dialogue about urban development: pristine symbolic cities vs. their more knotty and complex lived realities; tensions between private and public space; the individual vs. the multitude.

In this way, the action of this project has resolved into a prayer for both the real and the symbolic city, the past, the present and the future. A monumental documentation of flux, Ahmed tries to fix fleeting moments, and track the threads of disappearing histories, before they are obscured forever beneath the rubble.

Construction workers in their living quarters. Seen in this image is a window salvaged from the old city. Ahmed became fascinated by these artifacts and collected them to realize a large installation entitled Mecca Windows.

Living quarters for construction workers employed by the major contractors overseeing the development of the Grand Mosque and the redevelopment of the city.

Phone screens document and track every moment of the pilgrimage, streamed across Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat.

Ahmed Mater Biography

Ahmed Mater’s life and work have been shaped by seismic changes and unprecedented social shifts across the Arabian Gulf. Born in 1979 in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, Ahmed moved at an early age to the mountainous Asir region in the South and trained as a community doctor on the Saudi/Yemeni border before becoming one of the most significant Arab artists of his generation.

As an artist, Ahmed uses photography, film, sculpture and performance to map, document and analyse societal developments, considering their psychological impact on the individual, the community, urban environments and society at large. Entwining expressive and culturally engaged artistic aims with the scientific objectives of his medical training, his artistic practice embraces the paradoxes of science and faith. Employing broad research-based techniques, Mater mines and preserves forgotten narratives and unofficial histories to map the Kingdom's past, present and future. As a cultural producer and educator, Mater is dedicated to discourse and social activism as a means to tangibly influence the wider civil society.