At Saudi Arabia’s Diriyah Biennale, Art Moves in Procession

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.

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 during the Kosovo war. The images—fantastical birds and volcanic mountains interspersed with scenes of violence, including soldiers and tanks—are printed on felt, sprayed with ink and suspended throughout the space. What initially reads as joyful gradually reveals its traumatic substrate, imagination operating as shelter against horror.

“I made these drawings in 1999, while in a refugee camp in Albania during the war, as part of a program organized by the psychologist Angelo, where we were given felt pens and simple paper to draw,” Halilaj told Observer. The drawings depicted both dreams and traumas, but he waited 21 years before showing them publicly again. “Not because I didn’t want to speak, but because I felt there is a responsibility in how we talk about war, conflict and genocide today, especially when images circulate so easily and often without care. I needed time to poetically elaborate these experiences rather than expose them too directly.”

That gap between creation and public presentation speaks to the work’s complexity. Halilaj returned to the same psychologist, Giacomo Poli, two decades later, approaching the large-scale reproductions “almost as a form of psychodrama: not therapy sessions with people, but with drawings, treated as subjects.” The enlarged scale transforms the viewing experience. “We are surrounded by an overwhelming flow of images, often consumed quickly on small screens. By enlarging these childhood drawings, the work slows that experience down.”

Nearby, Daniel Lind-Ramos’s Con-junto (2015) and Ambulancia (2020) (2022-23) celebrate Caribbean music and performance through monumental assemblages of found objects from his native Loíza, Puerto Rico. Con-junto incorporates materials gathered after Hurricane Maria, while Ambulancia, made during the COVID pandemic, takes the shape of a cart equipped with emergency lights, a megaphone and a shovel, all rendered in the dark blues and purples of Puerto Rican funerals. The sculptures embody collective memory at architectural scale, personal artifacts becoming public monuments. Upstairs, Hazem Harb’s Gauze (2023-24) arranges pieces of white medical dressing to form figures resembling mutilated bodies, the material’s name possibly deriving from Gaza, where gauze has been produced for centuries. Since October 2023, Harb has followed documentation of the genocide in Gaza online; here, the gauze evokes the kafan, the white cloth used to shroud bodies before Muslim burial.

The second thematic movement, A Hall of Chants, foregrounds language and vocality. Nour Mobarak’s Dafne Phono (2024) reinterprets the world’s first known opera through 15 mycelium sculptures that “sing” the libretto in rare and endangered languages including Abkhaz, the click language !Xoon and the whistled Silbo Gomero. Word-for-word translations project on the wall, showcasing the diversity of linguistic systems while the fungal network speaks—or perhaps was always speaking, if we chose to listen.

Also in the hall, Daniel Otero Torres’s Echoes of the Earth (2026) constructs an ode to environmental defenders from around the world—Berta Cáceres from Honduras, Ken Saro-Wiwa from Nigeria, and others—through totemic wooden sculptures housed within a large frame alongside embroidered hammocks and water vessels whose surfaces ripple with ambient rainforest sounds. “My wish was to imagine a space where these silent heroes could meet,” Otero Torres told Observer. “A place of pause for travelers, a space for encounter, interaction and exchange.”

Elias Sime’s Lines in Nature (2025) series presents intricate geometric networks assembled from electronic waste—circuit boards, wires and computer keyboards shipped to Africa in staggering volumes. From a distance, the works resemble satellite imagery; up close, they reveal their fragmented origins. Sime, who co-founded the Zoma Museum in Addis Ababa, transforms discarded technology into meditations on the balance between progress and environmental cost. But if Sime excavates technology’s material underside, Kayfa ta’s installation traces its intellectual genealogy from a different angle. Housed in a modular structure designed by AAU ANASTAS, the publishing initiative presents research into the pioneering 1980s Kuwaiti company Sakhr Computers, which localized computing for Arabic, and Saudi internet forums of the 1990s—reminding us that technology’s history doesn’t belong exclusively to Silicon Valley but has multiple, parallel lineages.

Between thematic movements, Théo Mercier’s monumental House of Eternity (2026) occupies an entire hall as one of the biennale’s interior arenas. The French sculptor has transformed the space into a surrealistic landscape where four compacted sculptures rise from loose sand terrain, echoing termite mounds, desert monoliths and the wind-carved architectures of deep time. An elevated metal walkway cuts across the expanse, granting visitors an aerial perspective that reconfigures their relationship to the work. From above, the installation reveals itself as both fragile terrain and immersive stage set—a speculative archaeology of the present where sand seems to remember more than stone. White powdery sediments formed by the sand’s salt content accumulate like digital residue, prompting questions about what images might erupt if our data servers melted down.

Questions of what remains visible—and what gets buried—continue into A Collective Observation, which interrogates how we orient ourselves in the world through diverse knowledge systems and technologies. Moshekwa Langa’s Collapsing Guide (2000-03) series presents cartographic collages on construction plastic where seas appear black rather than blue—mapping reimagined through personal and political subjectivity rather than colonial logic. Taysir Batniji’s Remnants (2024-25) series fixes in oil paint the blurred, lagging images that appear when downloading documentation from Gaza via Telegram, freezing the moment of anticipation before unbearable knowledge arrives. If Batniji catches images at the threshold of visibility, Gala Porras-Kim interrogates what happens once objects have long been on view—her detailed colored-pencil drawings reproducing both sides of a display cabinet from Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, once titled “Treatment of the Dead” and containing shrunken heads and burial objects from diverse cultures. By meticulously rendering these “dead” objects, Porras-Kim questions museum authority while highlighting how history continually reshapes itself through conservation, decay and contemporary intervention.

The final thematic movement, A Forest of Echoes, gathers polyphonous life forms across scales from the cosmic to the bacterial. Raqs Media Collective’s Something Rare to Lose (2026) creates an immersive arena around a convalescence bed, with a breathing mattress and a glass-domed sculpture of lungs. The work foregrounds embodiment at its most fragile, asking who cares for the caregiver while channeling the medical philosophies of Ibn Sina and Al-Biruni. Oscar Santillán’s Anthem (2026) invites visitors to make animal-like sounds into suspended tree burls containing speakers and microphones; a machine learning system responds with hypothetical melodic vocalizations, creating a conversation between organic and artificial intelligence.

Another arena extends the biennale into JAX’s public spaces. Agustina Woodgate’s The Source (2026) comprises three drinking fountains developed through field research in Al Ahsa, the world’s largest oasis, drawing on the region’s 2,000-year-old gravity-based irrigation networks. The fountains deliberately expose their own infrastructure—tanks, pipes, faucets—making visible the hidden journey of Riyadh’s water, which arrives via a 500-kilometer desalination pipeline from the Persian Gulf. “The act of approaching, waiting, touching, and drinking becomes a micro-ritual,” Woodgate told Observer. “The work operates quietly, through repetition and circulation, allowing infrastructure itself to become perceptible—not as spectacle, but as a shared, political condition.”

Throughout, Ahmed explained, the exhibition approaches curation “not archaeologically, not mappingly, not cartographically, but sonically”—attending to echoes, reverberations and the way histories create resonant fields rather than fixed points. This methodology feels particularly urgent in a moment of global upheaval, offering what Razian called “different kinds of stories, different kinds of histories that we can learn from” beyond the bombardment of horrible news.

Ahmed noted the significance of Saudi Arabia launching with a biennale rather than an art fair. “The very first and bold large-scale event for contemporary art in Saudi Arabia is a Biennale. They could have started somewhere else. They could have started with art fairs or auction houses,” he said. “Imagine what it does to the next generation of artists here, whose first encounter—they’re on their roadmap. It’s works that they’re reading and in conversation with in a Biennale rather than in booths of an art fair.”

That commitment to prioritizing cultural infrastructure over the market imperative was reinforced on opening day when the Ministry of Culture announced a partnership between the newly established Riyadh University of Arts and London’s Royal College of Art. “Our collaboration with the Royal College of Art plays a central role in strengthening academic capacity, enabling cultural exchange and developing creative talent across the Kingdom,” Noha Kattan, deputy minister for national partnerships and talent development, told Observer.

I had my doubts about whether the JAX District, located somewhat apart from central Riyadh, would attract audiences beyond those already familiar with contemporary art. Yet the procession that opened the biennale suggested otherwise—streets lined with onlookers, a genuine sense of gathering and collective witness, not to mention a lot of very enthusiastic dancing. In a region where cultural infrastructure is rapidly expanding, the Diriyah Biennale positions itself as a discursive platform, a space where publics are emerging and actively engaged rather than simply addressed.

“In Interludes and Transitions” is on view at JAX District, Diriyah, Riyadh, through May 2, 2026.

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