- Exhibition features Saudi and international artists, 69 artworks and rare historical manuscripts
- Works draw inspiration from historic journeys, including the travels of Ibn Battuta
RIYADH: Travel is more than movement from one destination to another. It is an encounter with time, geography, weather, communities, and ideas that shape how people understand the world.
That broader understanding of travel frames “Along the Way,” a new exhibition by the Misk Art Institute at the Prince Faisal bin Fahd Arts Hall in Riyadh. Running through March 31, 2027, the exhibition brings together 34 artists from Saudi Arabia and abroad, presenting 69 works alongside rare historical manuscripts.
Inspired by historic journeys, particularly those of Ibn Battuta, the exhibition presents travel as both a physical and intellectual experience. Movement becomes a process of reflection and renewal, with each stage offering the possibility of personal transformation.
The selected works span painting, photography, sculpture, digital media, archival materials, and manuscripts. They explore landscapes, language, memory, cosmology, the changing body, and the evolution of historical narratives.
Cartography appears throughout the exhibition as an open and interpretive practice rather than a fixed system of coordinates. Maps are reimagined through lived experience, emotional insight, and poetic readings of space, allowing paths to loop, intersect, and lead visitors toward new ways of understanding place.
Travel as an emotional and shared experience
The exhibition examines travel as an emotional, communal, and intellectual journey. Visitors are invited to consider how movement generates knowledge, reshapes perspectives, and changes relationships with the wider world.
Installations and visual works explore maps, navigation, self-discovery, emotional cartography, and nature as a living map. The exhibition also presents major historical artifacts, including the manuscripts “The Book of Fixed Stars” by Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sufi and “Nuzhat Al-Qulub” by Al-Qazwini, as well as a copper astronomical disc reflecting Islamic civilization’s contributions to navigation and geography.
By connecting Arab and Islamic heritage with contemporary visual languages, “Along the Way” presents art as a space for dialogue, reflection, and the redefinition of the journey. Its arrangement of artworks in a series of transit points encourages visitors to pause, reconsider their position, and engage with the works and one another through the experience of movement.
Through gestures, images, and archival fragments, the exhibition presents travel as a path to knowledge—a journey that expands consciousness and deepens understanding.
