A group exhibition by Villa Hegra presented at Asia Now 2026, as part of the AlUla Cultural Season in Paris

Featuring new works by
Raghad Al-Ahmed & Reem Olyan
Latifa AlBokhari
Reem Ali
Reem Al Nasser
Zahra Bundakji
Bashaer Hawsawi

Curated by

Basmah Felemban & Gaël Charbau

Tables Around brings together six new proposals by seven women artists from Saudi
Arabia, conceived specifically for Villa Hegra’s presentation at Asia Now 2026, as part of
AlUla’s cultural season in Paris. Conceived by Artistic Directors Basmah Felemban and
Gaël Charbau, the exhibition takes the table as its point of departure: an ordinary object
that can also be a place of exchange, a working surface, a domestic architecture, a ritual
site or a landscape in miniature.

A table organises relationships. It determines who sits, who serves, who watches and
who waits; it can make hospitality possible, but may also reveal distance, hierarchy or
absence. Once a meal, conversation or gathering has ended, it retains traces of what has
taken place: objects left behind, gestures remembered, stories only partly told.
Across sculpture, textile, moving image, scent and crafted furniture, the artists approach
this familiar form from distinct personal and cultural perspectives. Tables become sites
of sensory experience, social encounter, inherited ritual and private memory; elsewhere,
they appear as fragile structures, poetic architectures or elusive presences. Moving
between the intimate and the collective, the works invite visitors to consider how everyday
objects can hold and transmit histories.

Rather than proposing a single image of contemporary artistic practice in Saudi Arabia,
Tables Around offers a set of situated perspectives: works shaped by individual research,
lived experience and conversations with the present.

This event is part of the AlUla Cultural Season in Paris, presented by Arts AlUla, Villa Hegra
and the French Agency for AlUla Development (Afalula). As part of the same programme,
the AlUla Contemporary Art Museum presents In the Bellies of the Rocks, an exhibition
by Saudi artist Ayman Zedani, at Paris Internationale (20–24 October 2026, preview on
19 October).

These events follow the exhibitions held during Paris Design Week at Lafayette Anticipations
(Life of Forms, 8–13 September) and at the Institut du monde arabe (AlUla: Designing
from the Land, 10–20 September), in which Villa Hegra participated.