As Saudi Arabia’s largest platform for contemporary art, the biennial functions as both a site of encounter and a testing ground for new cultural audiences. Courtesy of the Diriyah Biennale Foundation

The opening weekend of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale began not in a gallery but in a dry riverbed. Four-wheel-drive vehicles—known locally as “Chasse”—rumbled through Wadi Hanifah alongside camels, old and new modes of desert transport moving in tandem. Drummers emerged, clicking wooden blocks as they led a growing crowd through the JAX District’s industrial streets, transforming what might have been a standard (and often somewhat stuffy) art opening into something closer to a homecoming parade. The procession culminated in the biennale’s main plaza with a DJ and rap performance by Saudi artist Mohammed Alhamdan, known as 7amdan, whose work explores how ancient Bedouin song traditions collide with contemporary digital culture.

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This opening gesture encapsulated the entire exhibition’s animating idea: movement as a generator of culture. “In Interludes and Transitions,” the third edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, takes procession—whether of people, stories, commodities or even bacteria—as both its subject and methodology. Curated by Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed with a team including Maan Abu Taleb, May Makki, Kabelo Malatsie and Lantian Xie, the exhibition gathers roughly 70 artists across five warehouse halls in JAX, a creative district carved from Riyadh’s industrial heritage. The exhibition unfolds through four thematic movements—Disjointed Choreographies, A Hall of Chants, A Collective Observation and A Forest of Echoes—punctuated by what the curators call “arenas,” site-specific installations that create spaces for pause and gathering.

The biennale arrives at a pivotal moment for Saudi Arabia’s cultural landscape. Since the Diriyah Biennale Foundation was established in 2020, more than one million people have visited its two major exhibitions—this contemporary art biennale and the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah. The Ministry of Culture has added 360 cultural professions to the national occupational classification since its inception in 2018, and the sector now contributes over 20 percent more to the economy than it did then. Against this backdrop of rapid expansion, the biennale serves as the Kingdom’s largest platform for contemporary art, where many visitors encounter this kind of cultural space for the first time.

Razian and Ahmed describe their curatorial approach as thinking from this region rather than about it. In conversation, Razian explained that Arabic poetry emerged from the rhythm of moving through the desert, specifically the rajaz meter synced to camel steps. “These long journeys actually created cultural form,” she said. “So the procession itself is a producer of cultural forms.”

That idea manifests spatially through the scenography of Italian design studio Formafantasma, which transforms the industrial warehouses into a composition that feels like it’s levitating. Platforms and walls appear suspended, allowing light and sound to spill between sections. Artworks don’t occupy discrete rooms or sections but exist in a state of productive interference with one another.

The exhibition opens with Petrit Halilaj’s Very volcanic over this green feather (2021), an installation of large-scale reproductions of drawings the artist made at age 13 while in a refugee camp........

© Observer