Opening Reception: Scattered Earth, Sounded Depth

Join us to celebrate the opening for Scattered Earth, Sounded Depth: Penn Fine Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition featuring the work of Eissa Attar and Alvin Luong. Celebrate the return of the MFA exhibitions to campus, hear directly from the artists, connect with community, and enjoy some light refreshments.
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The Arthur Ross Gallery and Penn Fine Arts are pleased to present Scattered Earth, Sounded Depth, the 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition featuring the work of Eissa Attar and Alvin Luong. Through installation, moving image, and printmaking, Attar and Luong offer poetic reflections on landscapes and cultural histories. Their works explore geography as a site of cultural memory and migration while critically examining documentary practices and modes of display.

Eissa Attar’s practice investigates migration, belonging, and entropy through photography and moving image works. In Extract You Again, a series of sand drawings on acetate layered over images of consumer products and waste, Attar reflects on cycles of consumption and erasure in Saudi Arabia’s evolving landscape.

Alvin Luong’s multichannel video installation, Corals of Bidong, connects the history of Malaysia’s Bidong Island—once a refugee camp following the Vietnam War—to its present-day use as a coral research facility and a dubious coral wildlife trade. Developed over two years of intensive research, the work offers a profound meditation on human and natural migration. Through video, sculpture, and installation, Luong examines narratives of survival and the enduring social and environmental impacts of historical events.

Curated by Emily Zimmerman, Director of Exhibitions at the Arthur Ross Gallery, this exhibition marks the debut of the MFA Thesis Exhibition at the Arthur Ross Gallery.

Eissa Attar (b.  Jeddah) is an interdisciplinary artist and urban planner whose work explores memory, migration, and the built environment through photography and moving image. Drawing from Saudi’s digital footprint, material culture and spatial analysis, Eissa’s practice examines the layered histories and evolving narratives of place of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, often centering on Jeddah, Makkah, and the broader Hijaz region.Photography and video are often the starting point of their work, serving as an anchor for explorations of absence, erasure, and belonging. Eissa engages with the city’s shifting landscapes—its religious significance, urban transformations, and the ways in which memory is inscribed onto its built environment. These elements are reinterpreted in their studio through material experimentation, digital manipulation, and sculptural interventions, creating works that blur the line between documentation and abstraction.

Eissa’s work has been exhibited at Athr’s Young Saudi Artists, EFA Project Space in New York City, and Art Dubai. They are currently pursuing a dual master’s degree in City Planning and Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania.

Alvin Luong (b. Toronto) works with stories of human migration, land, and dialogues from diasporic and working-class communities to create artworks that reflect upon historical development and its intimate effects on the lives of people. Drawing, Photography, sculpture, and video articulate the artist’s expansive studio process that brings together field research, ethnography, and material experimentation.

Luong has exhibited and screened artworks in institutions including Boers-Li Gallery (Beijing), Gudskul (Jakarta), The Polygon Gallery (Vancouver), and Times Art Museum (Guangzhou). The artist has held research and resident artist appointments at the Inside-Out Art Museum (Beijing), HB Station Contemporary Art Research Center (Guangzhou), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto). Luong has been a recipient of the Long List Sobey Art Award (Canada) and was nominated for the 2021 Hans Nefkens Foundation LOOP Barcelona Video Art Production Award (Spain). The artist’s works have been acquired by The Rockefeller Foundation (New York City).