Marking Al Summary’s first institutional solo exhibition, Excavating the Sky features the artist’s recent essay film, What goes up (2024), as well as a series of related photographs and a new painting. Each body of work presents, as setting and subject, the state of Arizona where Al Summary spent her youth after emigrating from Saudi Arabia with her family in 2001 prior to 9/11. Much of the film concerns the Davis-Monthan US military airbase, which is Tucson’s largest employer, followed by Raytheon, a weapons manufacturing company that supplies arms to the U.S. government and other contractors across the globe. Raytheon is a primary supplier to Saudi Arabia, providing them with US-manufactured bombs and missiles that have been linked to violent attacks and civilian deaths in the ongoing Yemen Civil War.

In the film, a disembodied voice (Al Summary’s own) chronicles a time she almost enlisted in the US Army in a desperate bid to return to Saudi Arabia during a profound bout of homesickness. To her chagrin, she learns that the Army recruiters consider her a “security risk” and refuse to station her anywhere near the Middle East. The narrative then expands to include the story of two Iraqi pilots training at the military airbase—Rasid Mohammad Al Hayyani and Noor Al Khazali—who crashed in the Arizona desert in 2015 and 2017, respectively. Little to no information exists in the official records about the two pilots or their deaths, yet both died just before they were scheduled to go back to Iraq. The film’s three protagonists—Samar, Rasid, and Noor—each represent failed attempts to return home.