Ka'aba
2015
C-print
180.3 × 270.5 cm
C-print
180.3 × 270.5 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?
Pilgrims praying around the Ka‘aba during one of the five daily prayers. To see and hear the multitude of nearly three million souls – praying around the Ka‘aba, reciting their invocations to Allah, their voices as one as they speak the supreme supplication, ‘Labbaika Allahumma, Labbaik!’ (Here I am, O God, at thy command, Here I am!) – is an overwhelming reminder of the unifying principles of the hajj, the dense crowd sweeping in an almost impossible, undulating wave. Ahmed Mater2017
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.
