Abdul Rahman Taha

Abdul Rahman Taha (b. 1996, Madinah, Saudi Arabia) is a contemporary artist based in Riyadh. Trained in Architecture and Urban Planning, Taha works across installation, sculpture, and photography. His training is not incidental to the work. It shows up in how he reads a room, a street, a courtyard: as a system with rules, pressures, and memory baked in. Taha reads cities as living archives. Every street, wall, and courtyard holds layers of time, use, and erasure, evidence of who shaped a place, who passed through it, and what was quietly removed. His practice sits inside that gap between what a city remembers and what it forgets, tracing how culture embeds itself in built form, in folk games, in the objects people carry across generations. Folk games are a recurring presence in his work: not as nostalgia, but as evidence. A game carries spatial logic, social hierarchy, and generational transmission in a form small enough to hold in your hand. Taha uses these structures to ask larger questions about how communities store knowledge in bodies and objects across time. Space and time are not themes Taha circles back to. They are the actual material. His installations create conditions rather than images: a viewer moves through them and, in doing so, produces the work. Duration matters. What a space feels like at the start of a visit and at the end is not the same thing, and Taha treats that gap as the subject. Taha has shown widely across the region and beyond. Exhibitions include Light Years Apart at Noor Riyadh Art Festival (2024); The Nest at Al Riwaq, Manama, Bahrain (2024); We Feel You at Qurum, Muscat, Oman (2023); Conceptualize the Future Through Tradition at Misk Art Institute, Riyadh (2023); From Earth at ITHRA, Dhahran (2023); and Kingdom Photography Award at Hayy Jameel, Jeddah (2022), among others. His programs and institutional roles reflect a parallel commitment to building an arts ecosystem: Workshop Leader at Desert X (2024), Mentor for the Noor Riyadh Apprenticeship Program (2024), Panelist at Misk Art Institute (2025), Program Supervisor at Red Sea Museum (2026), and Art Director of DIGITALIZED, a book of 50 posters by global and Saudi artists (2024). Taha completed residencies at Misk Masaha Art Residency Cycle 6 and Intermix Art Residency, and has attended masterclasses at the Venice School for Curatorial Studies, London's Royal Academy of Arts, and the American University in Cairo. He holds the Kingdom Photography Award and the Virginia Burke Research Award.