Roads of Arabia exhibition, Benaki Museum

The travelling exhibition Roads of Arabia: Archaeological Treasures from Saudi Arabia was presented at the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece in 2019. It includes artefacts from the Arab Peninsula from prehistoric times to the 20th century, drawing a continuous line in time of the region’s cultural history. The exhibition was inaugurated at the Louvre in 2010 and since then it has been shown in three different continents.

The exhibition at the Benaki Museum — the exhibition’s 16th stop — signifies the first event in the southeast Mediterranean. busybuilding was commissioned to design the poster and key visual for Roads of Arabia in Athens. The inspiration behind the design is the horizon of the desert, a visual element that is part of the exhibition’s overall design. The duality of sand and sky becomes the backdrop against which the exhibition’s main exhibits are presented, in order to highlight them.

This work uses Lucas Le Bihan’s Sporting Grotesque together with the Greek version designed by George Triantafyllakos (Atypical). The Arabic text on the exhibition walls uses an unidentified typeface.