Rain - And Contemporary Art - Make For Fertile Ideas In Saudi Arabia

The first months of 2024 saw unprecedented rainfall and flooding across Saudi Arabia, which was prescient for the second edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (20 February - 24 May 2024), which takes as its thematic ‘After Rain’. In its exquisite curation, the exhibition allows visitors to inhale the intense scent of petrichor, and to examine our troubled world through the lens of artists, architects, and researchers. The curatorial team have fostered collaborations to present new, ambitious commissions and unearth works of art which speak from a part of the world, which is today, under an intense global spotlight.

Named after its positioning in the historic city of Diriyah, the bite-size biennial can be explored in a day but is worth returning to for further investigation and particularly, for its robust public programming and performance agenda. Works are spread through the halls and outside spaces of the new creative hub that is JAX District along its border with Wadi Hanifah, with some work off-site at Shamalat, a new cultural space reimagined by the artist Maha Malluh and syn architects. And architectural possibilities to enhance social and ecological futures permeate the exhibition. Dutch architect Anne Holtrop’s Glass to Stone offers a material study that will feed into a major commission for Misk Art Institute while Abundance & Scarcity by Azra Akšamija (a canopy created from refugee blankets and felt recycled from the 2023 Islamic Biennale in Jeddah) offers welcome shade between buildings.

TAYYŪN’s Insect Hotel is a permanent installation and rewilding project, and Vikram Divecha’s Wall Extract (Riyadh) presents a relic of urban demolition and erasure. Visitors can pause for reflection and refreshment in Britto Arts Trust’s Palan & Pakghor (Kitchen Garden & Social Kitchen) or the Njokobok Bar, two social spaces activated by communal cooking and storytelling sessions (hakawati).  

If your entry point is through either hall B1 or B2, you are immediately confronted by built structures of differing sensibilities. B1 is framed by the performative installation Charivari by Taus Makhacheva, a surreal take on a circus (a theme echoed outside by Ângela Ferreira’s Zip Zap Circus School), a black box cinema with an expansive film program ‘the documented and the fictionalized’ and, up the lush coral-carpeted stairs, a fascinating array of material in the mezzanine ‘Re/Search’ space. This is prefaced by arguably the most fascinating work in the show, Ines Weizman’s “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…” (2023), charting the 1941-43 itinerary of Josephine Baker across the Arab world. Alternatively, entering B2, you are thrust into Saudi Futurism, a collaboration between Ahmed Mater and Armin Linke, beginning a tantalising journey through the connected, interior halls which dramatically shift from stark white interiors with windows overlooking the dry wadi valley, to cavernous galleries with artworks punctuating the darkness.  

There is currently a curatorial penchant for survey showcases of Arab Modernists that have until now been under the radar, but never have Modern Arab works been hung and juxtaposed so magnificently as they are in B3, ‘Modern Legacies and Geopoetics’. Here the prelude is not unlike Weizman’s, with Zarina Bhimji’s Yellow Patch from 2011 travelling through derelict colonial interiors.

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After Rain in Riyadh – Saudi Arabia’s Contemporary Art Biennale Breaks New Ground in 2024

You emerge into a sea of colour and fabric, the vibrant textiles of Nabila Al Bassam (dating from 1993-99) setting the scene for the characters and costumes explored by the Saudi artist Safeya Binzagr’s photogravure prints Turathuna (Our Tradition) (1997-99), Rasheed Araeen’s People of Karachi (1955-58) and Hassan Sharif’s early Fluxus-inspired experimental projects (1979-84).

Surrounding these are captivating, heart-breaking impressions by Lala Rukh, produced during Pakistan’s military dictatorship in the 1980s when Rukh was an active propagator for human rights and yet the works are so far removed from this reality in their purity of mark making. Abdulrahman Al-Soliman’s Palm, Bow, and Fragments drawings, executed during the Gulf War of 1990, feature gestural drawings made using Chinese ink in response to witnessing Kuwait’s burning oil fields. The room concludes with Life Is a Woven Carpet (1995), a large-scale woven work by the eighty-eight-year-old Palestinian Samia Zaru and a brand-new, vast canvas by Alia Ahmad.

The drama intensifies in the ‘Water and Habitats’ section of the biennale, which is dominated by Alia Farid’s arresting In Lieu of What Was (2019), five giant fibreglass and polyester resin vessels, which sit alongside Hamra Abbas’s Mountain 5 (2023) carved out of lapis lazuli and granite, lying casually against one wall, stretching for six metres. There are also interactive works, such as Suzann Victor’s Strike (2021) which invites the audience to pull levers to activate sounds from the range of water-filled glasses below. Passageways open up through B5, around Reem Al Nasser’s Blue Windows (2022), Rosella Biscotti’s mesmerising rubber works, through El Anatsui’s Logoligi Logarithm, commissioned for a survey at Haus der Kunst in 2019, his signature bottle-cap work on an imposing scale and Regina Maria Möller’s DIE MOTTE (The Moth), which introduces a theatrical narrative played out through curtains.

Indeed, all the works in this hall are backdropped by luscious blue velvet fabric, so the intricate animals in Asma Bahmim’s Fantastia positively sing, as do Sara Abdu’s towers of soap in her installation Now That I’ve Lost You in My Dreams, Where Do We Meet? A piece from Tomás Saraceno’s Hybrid Webs series gives centre stage to arachnids, as part of a significant interdisciplinary initiative to support our common struggle against extinction.

At the opening, as Riyadh-residents proudly took selfies in front of Christine Fenzl’s Women of Riyadh photographs, the international art world gathered around Mohammad Alfaraj as he performs in his created space The Whispers of Today Are Heard in the Garden of Tomorrow. Proof, perhaps, that the Saudi scene, as it morphs exponentially, is covering all bases.

The Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale runs until May 24 at the JAX District in Diriyah, Riyadh. For more details click here.