Big, Bang, Boom… 2023 — Acrylics and spray paint on wall, approx. 10 × 8 m. RSH Street Art Festival, Al-Mughrizat District, Riyadh.
Painted for the second edition of RSH Street Art Festival — organised by the Saudi Ministry of Culture's Visual Arts Commission and co-curated by Basmah Felemban and Cedar Lewisohn — which transformed an abandoned building in Riyadh's Al-Mughrizat District, vacant for fifteen years, into a site for international and regional mural practice.
The mural is structured as a 3×2 grid of comic-style panels — six scenes reading like frames of a film strip, each a fragment of a larger sequence. The visual language is deliberately legible at first glance and unstable on closer inspection: flat black figures against blue and white grounds, neon outlines marking the panel borders, diagonal marks cutting across bodies mid-action. The figures are helmeted, armed, grouped — authority as silhouette, violence abstracted to the point of ambiguity. Hidden symbols and iconographic cues layer beneath the graphic surface, visible only to a viewer who stays.
The title is onomatopoeia. What Big, Bang, and Boom describe — an explosion, a collision, a confrontation — is never named. The panels suggest sequence without resolution. Censorship here operates as the work's formal principle: what is shown is a diagram of what cannot be said directly, painted on the exterior wall of a building the state abandoned and then reclaimed as a canvas.