Opening Celebration-Scattered Earth, Sounded Depth: MFA Thesis Exhibition

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 is 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.

About the Master of Fine Arts Program at the Weitzman School of Design
The two-year Master of Fine Arts program at University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design is focused on the professional development of studio artists. Through studio work, seminar courses, international residency opportunities and interactions with vital working artists, the program provides an open intellectual framework to foster critical awareness and independent methods of artistic research. Students extend their conceptual strategies while inventing and then refining their own hybridized forms of art making methods. The program encourages exploration, extending studies into other disciplines within the Weitzman School and the university-at-large with a rich selection of outside electives and optional certificate and dual-degree programs.

Host or Publisher Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania