Jibreel (Gabriel)
2012
C-print
140 × 200 cm
C-print
140 × 200 cm
Across hundreds of photographs and films, Desert of Pharan documents the rapid development of Islam’s holiest city, a place in a state of constant transformation. The shifting urban environment of the city is witnessed, as well as the lives lived amid the tumult. The title is taken from the ancient name for Mecca, or the wilderness and mountains surrounding it – the Desert of Paran, or Wilderness of Paran, mentioned in the Old Testament.
The project maps the tension between public and private space. While Mecca is home to more than a million residents, it is being transformed to cater to the needs of millions more pilgrims and tourists. Existing models of urban development have been implemented on a vast scale. Equipped with imported financial and development know-how, Mecca is attempting a transformation in order to adapt to the geopolitical, technological, environmental, geomorphological and religious context in which it exists.
In the city of Mecca, a new future is being drawn up. 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.
This body of work asks: Is public space in the Islamic city becoming a luxury item? Is the courtyard becoming a commercial?
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 signalled 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. Ahmed Mater2012
Like few other cities on earth, Mecca seems to buckle under the weight of its own dramatic symbolism. Mecca is rarely seen as a living city with its own inhabitants and historical development. Instead, it is almost exclusively seen as a site of pilgrimage, as a timeless, emblematic city.
