Forward Motion

For Sabih Ahmed, being invited to serve as co-artistic director of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia was a chance to experience a society in the midst of massive social and cultural transformation. While Saudi Arabia’s art scene is not new, fresh infrastructure is continually emerging across the country and its surrounding region—and this has placed the Gulf at the forefront of the art world’s thoughts.

Following a string of Saudi art events including Desert X AlUla and Sotheby’s Origins II sale, Art Basel made its debut in Qatar in February 2026. The fair opened against the backdrop of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, which launched in January with the title In Interludes and Transitions. This concurrent emergence of art-focused moments prompted Ahmed to take stock of cultural shifts.

‘We were interested in what the polyphony of epicentres are and of the seismic shifts that are going right now,’ Ahmed says. ‘A lot of the works have been selected from places where seismic shifts are going on as we speak.’

This is an apt approach for a biennale based in a country that is itself in a transitional phase, characterised by immense societal change. Launched in 2016 by the Saudi government and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the ambitious Saudi Vision 2030 project has seen the introduction of many cultural initiatives, intended to diversify the Kingdom economically away from oil-dependence through modernisation and the cultivation of soft power. This has included reforms expanding the number of women in the workforce and lifting the ban on women driving, alongside lifting the ban on cinemas, permitting concerts, and opening up the kingdom to foreigners for non-religious tourism.

“The biennale takes the idea of procession as its conceptual inspiration”

These social and cultural changes were drastic, and they encouraged many to move back to—or to change their plans to leave—the Kingdom. Among the latter was artist and curator Muhannad Shono, who had been considering a move to Australia. ‘The change came fast. I decided to remain and help cement something fluid,’ he says.

 Shono, who recently served as contemporary art curator at the 2025 Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah. moved his studio to Saudi’s JAX district in 2022. The area is home to other artist studios, galleries, and the Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art—the country’s first such museum. The expansive development was also helmed by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation—the state-affiliated organiser and funder of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale—and is the site of this year’s edition, which was opened by a grand procession.

Four trucks and several camels traversed the former industrial complex, gathering a crowd as they went. The performance, Folding the Tents, was orchestrated by multidisciplinary artist Mohammed AlHamdan (also known as 7amdan) and concluded with a mini-concert featuring Palestinian rapper Shabjdeed. However, this was more than just a celebration—the biennale takes the idea of procession as its conceptual inspiration.

 ‘Thinking of the world in terms of procession allows cultural forms to be understood through routes, rhythms, and relations rather than fixed origins,’ explains the biennale’s second co-artistic director, Nora Razian.

“It explicitly brings issues of sustainability to the fore during a time characterised by accelerated demolition and development”

 With the work of 70 artists installed in five warehouses throughout JAX, Ahmed and Razian’s edition is smaller than in previous years, and was designed for a cohesive exhibition experience. Their thoughtful curation was conceived to offer Saudi Arabia’s perspective on the world, rather than one imposed from the outside looking in. ‘What we had in mind was a space that people feel somehow they connect to, feel seen and reflected in in some way. That doesn’t mean nationally or culturally represented, but rather connected, to stories they can relate to,’ Razian explains.

The pair’s curatorial intentions become evident throughout the biennale‘s five thematic movements: The Procession, Disjointed Choreographs, a Collective Observation, a Forest of Echoes and a Hall of Chants. The former is a highlight, featuring a series of immediately visually striking works.

Upon entering, viewers are greeted by a Warli painting, Untitled (2018) by Indian artist Rajesh Chaitya Vangad. Practised by those native to a region along the Mahrashtra-Gujarat border in India, Warli painting is characterised by a white paint made from rice flour. On Vangad’s single-cloth canvas, an intricate narration of festivals, dances and symbolic geometric shapes denotes elements of landscape. At its centre, a spiralling procession of figures unravels.

 Next to this work, Ethiopian artist Elias Sime’s Lines in Nature series forms poetic abstractions made from electronic waste. In repurposing electrical wire, Sime transforms the nature of discarded materials, perhaps in an attempt to reach some kind of balance between technological development and its cost.

 The focus on abstract forms continues with late Filipino artist Pacita Abad’s Asian Abstractions (1983-92), featuring vivid compositions in the form of her signature trapunto—highly tactile, stitched and stuffed canvases. Across the way, a series of works by Palestinian American artist Samia Halaby are on view, ranging from her pastels on paper, to oil on canvas, and her signature kinetic paintings. One of the first artists to use computer to generate digital paintings, Halaby coded abstractions using her 1980s PC. The result was geometrically warped images, almost appearing as frozen screensavers.

The theme of reviving forgotten feminine histories connects many works across this movement, including those of Vietnamese artist Thao Nguyen Phan, whose installation includes a selection of works by Điềm Phùng Thị, a modernist sculptor whose legacy was relatively unknown until recently. Elsewhere, pioneering Saudi artist Shadia Alem’s intricate silkscreen prints depict stylised female spirits or Jinniyat, known for reviving a legendary lost river and bringing back prosperity to the land.

In Disjointed Choreographies, Emirati artist Afra al Daheri’s fragile installation reflects the disorienting effects of sudden cultural change. A glass table with concrete blocks forms the basis of Dining East or West?, around which glass casts of limbs and feet are scattered, denoting the traditional Saudi custom of eating on the floor. Other abstracted glass vessels are also strewn about, evoking a sense of being frozen in time.

Throughout Saudi’s art scene, however, there is no such sensation. Shortly before the opening of the Diriyah Biennale came the launch of the latest edition of Desert X AlUla (founded in 2020), part of the AlUla Arts Festival. Now in its fourth edition, the open-air exhibition features 11 large-scale sculptural installations by Saudi, regional and international artists, who are prompted to create works that respond to or align with the desert location.

This year, Saudi artist Mohammed Al Faraj presents What was the Question Again?. The work features a demarcated circular maze, at the centre of which sits a tree reconstructed from the limbs of various other trees, symbolically functioning as ecological fragments of memory. Indian artist Vibha Galhotra also utilises discarded materials with Future Fables, a sanctum-like structure which explicitly brings issues of sustainability and upcycling to the fore during a time characterised by accelerated demolition and development.

“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is working overtime to establish its cultural legitimacy”

One such development is the newly announced AlUla Museum of Contemporary Art, which has no opening date as yet, but forms part of Vision 2030. Earlier this month a preview exhibition, staged in collaboration with Paris’s Centre Pompidou, opened on the site where the Lina Ghotmeh-designed institution will eventually stand. Titled Arduna, which translates to ‘our land’ in Arabic, it features more than 80 works from the collections of both the Pompidou and the Royal Commission AlUla, including pieces by modern masters such as Picasso, and prominent Saudi artists including Manal AlDowayan. 

Back in Riyadh, commercial and modern art endeavours appear to be bearing fruit. The night after the biennale’s opening, at Sotheby’s nearby showroom, Coffee Shop in Madina Road (1968) by renowned modernist Safeya Binzagr sold for $2.06 million USD—more than 10 times its high estimate.

Binzagr’s work features prominently in the exhibition Bedayat, Beginnings of Saudi Art Movement at the National Museum of Saudi Arabia. The show presents a holistic compilation of modern art produced from the 1960s to the 1980s. Also on view is prominent Saudi artist Faisal Samra, whose newly commissioned large-scale black-and-white abstract painting is also exhibited the biennale, and his 1976 photograph, Perfomance Target, and at the exhibition Art across the Arabian Gulf at the MISK Art Institute in Riyadh.

Clearly, with such a vast array of simultaneous offerings, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is working overtime to establish its cultural legitimacy via the global art landscape. And so far, at least in terms of visitor figures, its endeavours would appear to have been successful. Since the Diriyah Biennale Foundation was established in 2020, its two major exhibitions—the Diriyah Biennale and the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah—have attracted more than one million people.

However, these are both relatively young events and, as artist and curator Shono observes, novelty can wear off fast. He describes the first editions of the Diriyah Biennale, the Islamic Arts Biennale and Desert X AlUla as exciting inaugural ventures that were extremely well funded, holding great merit and value. But, several years on, and amid rumours of budget cuts and general economic downturn tied to the falling cost of oil, the question of their future sustainability naturally arises.

‘Inaugural is now in the past,’ Shono reflects. ‘Now is the time for realising sustainability, meaningful additions to the cultural economy, and creative output that fragments the edges of traditional categorisation to generate authentic and resilient expression. It’s time to replant the grassroots and work with less to do more.’ —[O]

Main image: Sara Abdu, Desert X AlUla (2026). Photo: Lance Gerber