Al-Mabad

Overview

Al-Mabad—Arabic for the temple or a place of devotion—is an original hand-carved wooden sculpture created in dialogue with the Mu‘allaqah of Antarah ibn Shaddad, one of the celebrated pre-Islamic Arabic odes known as the Mu‘allaqat. Rather than illustrating the poem literally, the work responds to its enduring values of courage, loyalty, guardianship, and belonging.

The composition brings together the head of an Arabian horse and a miniature architectural structure evoking a fortress. The horse does not appear as an ornament or an isolated symbol, but as a vigilant presence joined to the place it guards.

Relief carving, architectural rhythm, and sculptural form merge into a single structure in which horse and fortress remain distinct yet inseparable. The work captures not the spectacle of battle, but the charged stillness before danger—the moment when protection becomes part of the form itself.

Al-Mabad approaches devotion not as ritual alone, but as steadfast presence: the guardian remaining at the threshold, bound to the place, the memory, and the values he protects.