In the Bellies of the Rocks
Ayman Zedani
As part of the AlUla Cultural Season in Paris, Arts AlUla and the AlUla Contemporary Art Museum, together with AFALULA, join Paris Internationale to present In the Bellies of the Rocks, an exhibition by artist Ayman Zedani. Set at the fair’s entrance as an immersive environment, the project reflects the Museum’s commitment to artists whose work emerges from a long-term engagement with AlUla, its land and the wider region. By supporting commissions that can unfold over time, from research through production, display and ultimately acquisition, the museum seeks to build a collection shaped not only by artworks, but also by the processes and questions from which they emerge.
Developed through several years of research across AlUla and northwestern Arabia, Zedani’s project moves through archaeological sites, desert landscapes and the Red Sea coast, tracing civilizations from the past and the gaps they have left behind. Its point of departure lies in these discontinuities: missing forms, incomplete records and traces that resist a single interpretation. Rather than treating such absences as voids to be resolved, the artist approaches them as spaces for speculation, where archaeological observation, mythology, material evidence and imagined narratives coexist.
At the heart of the exhibition is the video installation In the Bellies of the Rocks (2026), shown alongside a series of photographs, newly commissioned sculptures and spatial interventions that extend this research into physical space. Created with the Museum’s collection in mind, these works give material form to a speculative archaeology. Objects and fragments drift across systems of classification, memory and belief, blurring the line between archaeological artefact, factitious evidence and artwork.
Through this “parafictional” archaeology, Zedani invites us to see history not as a settled account, but as a narrative constantly evolving, shaped by landscape, memory and imagination, and by the ways we read and pass on what remains.
Candida Pestana and Arnaud Morand – co-curators of the show
About Ayman Zedani
Ayman Zedani’s diverse and research-based artistic practice explores the future of the Arabian Peninsula through the lens of the human-nature relationship. Blending spiritual ecology, science fiction and new materialist philosophies, his immersive installations seek to renegotiate relationships between human and more-than-human worlds.
Rooted in the region’s histories and landscapes, his projects weave together fact and fiction, scientific inquiry, material experimentation and speculative narrative to recover memory and imagine alternative futures.
Zedani has exhibited locally and internationally, including at Dream City Festival, Tunis (2025), the Istanbul Biennial (2025) and Sharjah Biennial (2025). He has also participated in the Islamic Arts Biennale, Jeddah (2023), Desert X AlUla (2022), the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2021), Expo 2020 Dubai, the Lahore Biennale (2020) and BIENALSUR, Buenos Aires (2019). He was the recipient of the inaugural Ithra Art Prize in 2018.