Material Witness: Celebrating Design From Within
An exhibition exploring design as a situated practice, shaped by landscape, craft and material intelligence in AlUla.
Open at Design Space AlUla until 28 February 2026, Material Witness: Celebrating Design From Within explores design as a situated and lived practice—shaped by landscape, climate, craft and experience rather than surface expression. Developed as a central focus of the fifth edition of the AlUla Arts Festival, the exhibition brings together regional and international designers whose work is grounded in material research, local knowledge and contemporary innovation.
Conceived as a constellation of interconnected programmes, the exhibition brings into dialogue Madrasat Addeera, prototypes from the AlUla Artist Residency – Design Edition 2025, winning and shortlisted projects from the AlUla Design Award 2025, and selected outcomes of the inaugural AlUla Designathon. Shaped through close collaboration with designers, artisans and cultural partners, it reflects an approach to exhibition-making that privileges process, exchange and long-term engagement with place.
Curated by Dominique Petit-Frère and Majedah Alduligan, with artistic direction by Ali Alghazzawi and Arnaud Morand, Material Witness positions design as a form of cultural inquiry. Objects, prototypes and material studies reveal how design responds to environmental conditions, inherited techniques and contemporary challenges—offering a grounded perspective on innovation rooted firmly in context.
Artist Residency – Design Edition 2025
The participating designers include Altin Studio (Yasmine Sfar and Mehdi Kebaier), Aseel Alamoudi, Ori Orisun Merhav, Paul Moustapha Ledron and Studio ThusThat. Their projects—ranging from furniture and urban installations to experimental material systems—draw on local resources and knowledge while addressing broader questions of sustainability, production and cultural continuity. The designers were selected by an international jury chaired by Humberto Campana, reflecting the programme’s commitment to both regional relevance and global dialogue.
Altin Studio
Yasmine Sfar and Mehdi Kebaier bring a rare combination of material sensitivity and technical rigour to a body of work that reads like a field notebook turned into sculpture. Their triptych Wadi, Waha and Yusr treats the palm not as a prop but as a living archive: the monumental, charred palmwood stacks of Wadi evoke sedimented memory and Nabatean traces; Waha’s suspended braided canopy offers a delicate, sheltering counterpoint; and Yusr’s cinched palm-table is an intimate précis of the research. Working with local artisans, the studio turns ancestral technique into contemporary poetics — the result feels both deeply rooted and quietly inventive, a convincing argument for craft as a vehicle of place and collective memory.
Ori Orisun Merhav
Merhav’s work is thoughtful, tactile research made luminous. Building on her lac and shellac investigations, she transforms discarded palm sheaths into biomorphic, resinous lights that glow like fossilised amber, while seating made from oil-treated stalks honours the plant’s natural curves. Her practice reads as a patient dialogue with vegetal histories: the objects retain the palm’s scents, tensions and pigments, and in doing so propose an ecology of design that is sensorial, ritualised and unexpectedly tender. These pieces feel less like products than invitations to listen to the vegetal world.
Paul Moustapha Ledron
Ledron’s pieces are exercises in slowed attention: informed by West African lineages and made with care in the region, they favour nuance over spectacle. A vertical lamp filtered by handmade palm paper, a daybed upholstered in hand-quilted cyanotype, and an incense altar that releases scent in measured intervals all compose a language of pause and presence. The materials — black-dyed meranti, sandiyan, brass and cyanotype textile — are deployed with restraint and tact; the suite reads as a meditative architecture for domestic ritual, one that asks the viewer to breathe and dwell rather than consume.
Aseel Othman Alamoudi
Alamoudi reframes the ordinary bench as a theatrical, landscape-inflected object. Cast in sand to capture the strata and fractures of AlUla’s cliffs, her benches and stools invite sitting, climbing and play, while also functioning as sculptural markers of time and erosion. The work is playful without losing seriousness: it proposes that urban furniture can be a catalyst for encounter and memory, and the larger masterplan she sketches suggests these elements could activate public space at scale. It’s an imaginative, site-responsive approach that balances whimsy with architectural thinking.
Studio ThusThat
Kevin Rouff and Paco Böckelmann turn industrial detritus into eloquent statements about extraction and regeneration. Their seating, forged from basalt and metallurgical slag, references cairns and stacked stone while rendering slag’s molten unpredictability as a shimmering, almost volcanic surface. The juxtaposition of carved basalt and recycled slag is forensic and poetic: the pieces interrogate material legacies and imagine alternative values for waste. The outcome is physically striking and conceptually sharp — design that performs critique while proposing a tangible, beautiful afterlife for industrial by-products.
Complementing these works are the winning and shortlisted projects from the AlUla Design Award 2025, developed under the theme The Ingenuity of the Human Hand. Presented alongside outcomes from the inaugural AlUla Designathon, the exhibition captures multiple tempos of design practice, from extended research to rapid, collaborative experimentation.
Together, these initiatives articulate AlUla’s growing design ecosystem—one shaped by collaboration, material intelligence and a respect for place. As a centrepiece of the AlUla Arts Festival, Material Witness: Celebrating Design From Within affirms AlUla’s role as a living cultural laboratory, where design serves not only as an object or outcome, but as an ongoing dialogue between material, memory and imagination.
