As a young girl in Jeddah, Anhar Salem found pleasure in digital forms of expression. Making videos with her sister Ansam about their daily lives was one step on the way to becoming one of the most promising Saudi artists, with her work featured in the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah in 2025 and later in the Bukhara Contemporary Arts Biennale.
In her work, Anhar documents and archives everyday life in the public sphere of the internet.
Now in France for an art residency, at the Pinault Collection in Lens, she is developing a film about digital piracy and cinephilia in the Arab world. She describes herself not as a digital artist, but as an archivist: “It’s because my work is oriented towards documentary,” she explains.
Her practice depended on archiving and documenting found images, as seen in her Media Fountain in Jeddah’s Islamic Arts Biennale, which she considers “the peak of my approach of archiving internet communities.”
Media Fountain combined digital profiles of internet users with the idea of spirituality, all contained in an installation that resembled a tiled wudu ablution fountain.
This context has raised many questions in her mind, notably about privacy and public places within the context of self-representation.
Reflecting on her online presence, and the idea of documenting the self, is an -approach she uses to express her identity and mixed ethnicity.
Salem was born in 1993 and raised in Jeddah. Her family emigrated from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, but their story contains more details about Yeminis migrating to Indonesia and to India at different stages. “My grandfathers moved from Yemen to Indonesia, and part of my family in Hadramout moved to India, and then also to Indonesia.”
Mixed ethnicities and backgrounds may have inspired her interest in documenting her own community and that of others online. She talks about how her family has influenced her work, her father being a photographer who opened studios in Riyadh and Jeddah. She filmed home videos with her sister, and she learned graphic design from her father and brother. In 2015, the two sisters first uploaded videos about their lives and neighbourhood. Soon she was showing her work in Jeddah’s galleries.
“At that time, I noticed that there was no representation of this Hadhrami, Indonesian community. So, I started to document it and then published directly online.”
Documenting multiple identities featured in her Media Fountain at the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah earlier this year. Her work there was an archive of thousands of online profiles. “It was also research. I used online avatars and was interested in how people represent themselves in their profile pictures.”
How did that research feed into her main theme, of discussing the idea of spirituality in the digital age?
“It’s about spirituality and new algorithmic social contexts… how the media in general have affected our collective experiences. I think I was mainly interested in how social parameters were transformed into the digital sphere. And in the form of the artwork itself, I think it led to the idea of the tiles. Every tile in the installation represents one person’s online profile. For these images I collected maybe 3,000 profile pictures from TikTok, Facebook, X and sometimes from Instagram. And I also had ‘found footage’—materials, which the viewer sees when they place their palms under that golden, tap-like fixture.”
In her early practice of documenting personal and community life online, she soon found out that it was becoming unnecessary, due to technological advances. These meant that people were documenting their own lives. She moved to cooperating with other creators during an art residency in AlUla in Saudi Arabia. There, she worked with locals on documenting their daily lives in the city. She describes the process as ‘collaborative,’ saying that the locals were able to control their image by shooting the videos themselves.
The idea of collaboration is essential for Salem: “I think it has changed my idea of authorship. I don’t think that the artist can go it alone! Even if you work alone, like with your own painting for example, you still use symbols, or things that you take from your environment, or from a kind of collective unconscious. And I think this is what is interesting for me, that we all come somehow from a real political social context, and we all share it together.”
The idea of documenting oneself entails a presence in front of the lens, which is something Anhar does not shy away from. She appears, for example, in A Donkey Will, a video installation shown at Bukhara Biennale, which was done in collaboration with Qatari artist Majid Al-Remaihi and Uzbek puppeteer, Iskandar Khakimov.
In the documentary part of the work, Salem performed the role of Khoja Nasreddin, a classic character in Central Asian and Arab -literature. Was it a novelty for her, to be a performer? “No, I did it at the beginning, back when I was making video diaries within my community in Jeddah. I was also documenting myself as a woman, alone in my family house. Dealing with my own body in space. I did several performances and uploaded them online.”
The novelty in Bukhara was the concept of collaboration. Among her collaborators was the Saudi poet, Hamza Kashgari, who has ancestral links to Uzbekistan. She also found the idea of working with local craftspeople intriguing: “I was happy that, through a joint effort, we could get away from the idea of the artist as the presiding mind and the others as just labourers.”
Salem studied Information technology in Jeddah, then completed a postgraduate degree at Le Fresnoy-Studio national des arts contemporains in Tourcoing, France, where she met Majid Al-Remaihi who was also studying there. “I was experimenting with my friends and sometimes performing. Then Majid said, maybe you can also be my collaborator. For me, this was a crucial moment in my thinking about art within a sociopolitical context. I hope we can go further in this direction, instead of having only one name, like a brand name.”
