Asaad Badawi

A documentary shot in Medina, Saudi Arabia, where an illuminating narrator leads a journey through the city’s neighborhoods, landmarks, and iconic features.

The artwork exists in a hardware dump form, representing a digital excavation process, unearthing alternative ways of looking at written Arabic. One screen displays a computer adventure, a fictional quest in which the alphabet is "discovered" for the first time, from an isolated tree in a digital desert to outer space. By taking pixels as fundamental formation units, letters appear, and subsequently shatter or disappear. New possibilities, distorted letters and non-existent combinations emerge. The other screen displays interfaces of vintage computer programs: returning to the pioneering softwares in which Arabic appeared for the first time on the computer screen.