On October 2, 2022, Misk Art Institute presents Tales of Nostalgia, one of the key exhibitions of the Institute. Featuring 12 Saudi and international artists, the show explores themes of time, memory, and nostalgia, using emerging technologies to reimagine alternate narratives and future possibilities. This project stands as a thoughtful meditation on the fluid nature of time and its entanglement with cultural identity and technological transformation.

Within the scenography of the exhibition, the intent was to evoke a sense of disorientation and ambiguity—where the tactile materiality of textiles intersects with the invisible immateriality of digital waves. The spatial design takes inspiration from a maze or labyrinth, guiding viewers through a thread of narratives. This non-linear experience dissolves conventional divisions of space, allowing audiences to perceive spatiality in a more fluid way, and drawing parallels between the physical tactility of soft and hard surfaces and the invisible logic of machine learning systems.

A core concept in the exhibition is nostalgia—specifically, the longing for home. Repetition of the past can serve as a means of navigating the unfamiliar. This idea is echoed through the use of traditional patterns such as Al Sadu, a Bedouin weaving practice deeply rooted in the Saudi Arabian landscape and cultural memory. Made collaboratively—often by women—and using materials like goat, camel, and sheep hair, Al Sadu textiles historically served both functional and symbolic roles in nomadic life. These woven patterns not only offered information about environment and lineage (through the wasm), but also mirrored the linear forms of the desert horizon.

In the exhibition, these linear motifs are reinterpreted in soft textile dividers, encouraging visitors to explore how similar patterns are echoed in other systems—such as sound waves, data circuits, and the pathways people trace through an exhibition space. The physical act of moving through these spaces mirrors the weaving process itself, reinforcing a sense of layered memory and cultural connectivity.

Ultimately, the artworks are not static but kinetic—interacting with and wrapping around the viewer’s movement to create intimate new encounters. The woven demarcations of space function like data structures, containing embedded cultural and symbolic information tied to privacy, ownership, and history. Language, too, carries spatial and linear qualities, underscoring the layered complexity of time and communication. Through repetition, reinterpretation, and connection, the exhibition offers a poetic comparison between the analogue and digital realms, insisting that these works must be experienced in space to fully reveal their meaning.