In his multidisciplinary practice, Ahmed Mater explores the socioeconomic changes that are reshaping Saudi Arabia, offering a harsh look at the realities that are beyond the narratives of oil wealth and religious fundamentalism.

Mater was born in 1979 in Tabuk, a city in the northwest of Saudi Arabia, near the border with Jordan. At the age of 19, he entered medical school, and while shooting X-rays images at the government hospital in Abha, near the southern tip of the country, he developed an interest in photography. Five years later, he quit medicine to become an artist, but the experience of medical practice still infuses his work with references to scientific knowledge.

“Mitochondria: Powerhouses,” Mater’s exhibition at Galleria Continua in San Gimignano, drew its title from the name of an organelle—a cellular structure—the primary function of which is to power cellular activities in living beings with large quantities of energy. Drawing from this idea, and using multiple mediums, the show investigated two powerful forces that fuel the global economy: faith and the exploitation of natural resources.

Images of the desert were also recurring throughout the show, as the subject of the artist’s current research on “economic cities” and the profit-driven conversion of thousands of square kilometers of sand dunes into new metropolises in the Arabian Peninsula. “Cities built purely for economic speculation, are soulless, ghost cities, setting an example of economy that may have great social and environmental repercussions,” the artist told me. “Moving to Riyadh, I recently started investigating life sustainability in the desert: nomadic populations survived in the desert, constantly moving after available resources; on the contrary, cities don’t move. Maybe we should start looking for sustainable solutions in the environment itself.”

Linking into this idea was Mitochondria: Powerhouses (2017), the show’s spectacular centerpiece. In the gallery’s central hall, pieces of fulgurite—tubes of vitrified sand that are sometimes formed when lightning strikes land—emerged from white jute bags filled with sand, with others planted in piles of sand on a raised floor, appearing like trees that thrive in bare landscapes. Fulgurite resembles dry and contorted roots or branches, and one had the impression of walking into a petrified forest. On a wall above the installation, a Tesla coil intermittently unleashed flashes of lightning, filling the gallery with deafening crackles—perhaps a metaphor of the desert as an energy-producing “powerhouse.”