RIYADH: “Two Swords and a Palm: The Saudi Emblem Archive” exhibition opened to the public on Saturday and runs until Nov. 21, providing a visual guide to the emblem of Saudi Arabia, archiving its historic significance and use over the years.
The exhibition was curated by Mohammed Alruways and Abdullah Kenani, a Saudi pair whose passion for heritage drove them to painstakingly build this archive.
“This whole project started four years ago,” Alruways told Arab News. “We started to become interested in the changes of the emblem and noticed that it doesn’t have a specific drawing. So, we started to investigate the changes throughout the years, since the unification of Saudi in the ’30s until now.”
Alruways and Kinani began the project together, collecting objects adorned with the emblem and digitizing them.
But their biggest challenge was not collecting pieces for the archive but tracing them back to specific dates and professionally digitizing and archiving them.
