Armin Linke is a photographer and filmmaker who documents the impact of globalization, the built environment, and postindustrial economies while questioning the nature of the photographic medium and its conventions of display. Often working with scientists and other experts, he has explored topics ranging from space mining to a particle physics laboratory, power sources, and his own photographic archive. He has had solo exhibitions recently at Centre Pompidou (2023/2024), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (2023), and the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale (2023). He is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.

Ahmed Mater, trained as a physician, is a multidisciplinary artist known for his photography and conceptual works. In long-term projects such as the historical survey Prognosis/Saudi Arabia (2022) and Desert of Pharan (2016), a compelling photographic portrait of the holy city of Makkah, he has scrutinized the changing realities and unofficial histories of Saudi Arabia. As a co-founder of Edge of Arabia and founding director of the Misk Art Institute, Riyadh (2017–18), he has also played a key role in cultivating the Saudi contemporary art scene. He has had major solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum (2019), King Abdullah Economic City (2018), Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC (2016), and has taken part in the Venice Biennale (2009/2011) and the Sharjah Biennial (2007/2013).

Saudi Futurism (2024) is an installation that explores the changing infrastructure of a country in transition and the projected futures of the past and present. For this first-time collaboration, Linke and Mater traveled throughout the country documenting industrial, scientific, and historical sites, from a dairy farm to the Aramco archives, landmark buildings, the Shaheen supercomputer, and the exhibition of the megaproject NEOM. Their photographs are installed in an array of multi-sized prints, a physical set of hyperimages. Viewers make associations between the photographs, editing them into their own sequence of meaning as they walk through the space of the installation. Implementing materials discarded from other exhibitions held at the site and giving them a new context, the presentation structure is also an open cache. Theoretically the images could be switched out or “reloaded” through the sides, a possibility indicating that the visions and technologies of one age become rapidly outdated and are constantly being replaced.