“I have no studio so my studio is where I can find people. When I see the opportunity I go. That is my way of thinking about art.”
Born 1973, Khamis Mushait where he lives and works today, Gharem is both a practising conceptual artist and a Major in the Saudi Arabian Army. He studied at the Al-Miftaha Arts Village in Abha along with his friend Ahmed Mater Al-Ziad Aseeri. The artists of this village share a similar vision and in 2004 they staged a group exhibition, Shattah, a significant step in the recent history of contemporary art in Saudi Arabia.
His principal contribution to ‘Edge of Arabia’ involves an enormous rubber-stamp, designed specifically for the exhibition. The stamp is concerned with the reformation of behaviour. The text in the stamp, roughly translated from Arabic, reads as ‘show more commitment’, and later, ‘Amen’. As an artist whose work deals in intervention there is an analogy here between the idea of delivering a judgement on your environment as an artist, and the approval or disapproval implied by Gharem’s stamp.
Other work includes Flora and Fauna, a piece exhibited in the recent 2007 Sharjah Biennial, which documents a performance during which Gharem wrapped himself up in plastic alongside a local Cornocarpus Erectus tree. There is also documentation of his Manzoa performance that took place in a district of Jizan inhabited by people about to move out. On each house was the word manzoa, signifying that these houses would soon to be taken away. In many ways the people continuing to live there, their homes roof-less, were in every sense about to be removed. Gharem painted the word manzoa on his shirt and for a day and a night moved about among them, as if a ghost, himself already removed.
