The second Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale next year (20 February to 24 May) looks like going a long way towards its progenitors’ ambitions to further establish Saudi Arabia as a significant destination for art. It will have 92 artists from 43 countries, it will occupy seven sizeable warehouse spaces and multiple smaller and al fresco locations mostly in the JAX district of Diriyah, and its curatorial team have come up with a theme and a selection of artists that promises great things.
All this is a substantial increase on the Biennale’s first edition which had an already-sizeable group of 63 artists and collectives. For 2022 it was all fitted into one location, the repurposed Western Hajj Terminal at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah.
For 2024 the artistic director, the well respected German curator Ute Meta Bauer (right) has chosen as the theme After Rain. Her curatorial statement talks of opening up “a moment of revitalisation and renewal”, introducing the Biennale as “a nurturing entity, filled with life, while acknowledging the necessity of water for all forms of life that dwell and seek shelter on our planet”. So the work on show will “engage with the human-nature continuum, examine the built environment, observe the state of our surrounding landscapes, recount histories, and encourage us to listen more closely”.
There’s also a lyrical reference to the perceived experience of rain: “Moments before it rains – and lingering on well after – a pleasant, earthy odour permeates the air … The Biennale is a multi-sensory experience”.
And of course there’s a wider narrative: “All life-forms are exposed to the effects of climate change – torrential rains, lack of rain, unpredictable rain – and its effects of forced displacement, the destruction of habitats and livelihoods, and the extinction of species …”
It works rather well all round. In a recent interview Prof Bauer found some more apposite metaphors: “The air is cleared. As the desert starts blooming, animals come out. It’s a moment of departure”.
The Biennale will presents artworks in seven halls plus “numerous” courtyards and terraces in the JAX district of Diriyah, the former industrial area now being repurposed as an arts hub (which happens to be situated along a wadi, which at least implies seasonal water) as well as other spaces across Diriyah for performance, workshops and talks.
For the past ten years Ute Meta Bauer has been the Director of Singapore’s NTU Centre for Contemporary Art and Professor in the School of Art, Design, and Media at its parent body, Nanyang Technological University. Before that she had an extended at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning and was Director of the MIT Visual Arts Program; and for more than twenty-five years she has curated exhibitions and presentations on contemporary art, film, video and sound, with a focus on transdisciplinary formats – her recent CV includes co-curating the 2022 Istanbul Biennial and the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in the same year.
Prof Bauer’s co-curators on the Biennale are Wejdan Reda (Saudi Arabia, who also co-curated the first edition); Anca Rujoiu (Romania); and Rose Lejeune (UK). Rahul Gudipudi (India) is an Adjunct Curator.
Reda has expanded the Biennale’s narrative by developing commissions and facilitating collaborations with local experts from different fields, including urban planners, botanists, and local chefs. Artists have been developing their contributions throughout the year through on-site research trips.
Anca Rujoiu has been responsible for developing the Biennale Encounters, a year-long series of talks, conversations, workshops, collective walks, and readings which started back in April as a way of growing a community around this young Biennale – “Biennale Encounters plants seeds, makes connections, gathers audiences, and welcomes dialogue”, says the website.
And Rose Lejeune is putting together the performance programme, with events ranging from musically inspired healing sessions to spoken-word performances, sonic activations of works in the exhibition, and performances drawing from the history of theatre and dance.
Meanwhile Rahul Gudipudi is curating the Learning Garden, an online space designed to extend the conceptual ground of the exhibition and its programmes. It is conceived as an outgrowth and “rewilding” of topics explored by Biennale artists. It also presents materials native to digital experience and a series of commissions that intersect the research threads of the exhibition, while enabling a larger public within and beyond Saudi Arabia to engage with the Biennale.
Looking down the list of participating artists, we found that a third of them are from the wider Gulf region. The only UAE name we could find is that of Hassan Sharif, though. There are of course several Saudi contributors, among them Safeya Binzagr (the only female artist in Saudi Arabia to have her own museum). Riyadh-based artist Ahmed Mater will be collaborating with the Berlin filmmaker Armin Linke on a work about Saudi futurism since the 1940s. The Yemini artist Sara Abdu, who now lives and works in Jeddah, will present towers made from artisanal soap bars, alongside an installation combining sounds and palm trees by the Saudi artist Mohammad AlFaraj.
The really impressive feature of the list is the sheer geographical range. There aren’t too many North Americans (the impressive Joan Jonas is the only one we could spot) and we saw only a handful from South America – the Brazilian Paulo Tavares is one of several Biennale contributors from an architectural background.
But, as you’d expect from Prof Bauer’s day job, there are many from South East Asia – from Singapore, China, Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan. The European contingent does include several who are German-born or -based, predictably enough, but we also noted the Roma artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas (who presented a huge, brilliantly coloured textile palace that celebrated Roma life and history at the 2022 Venice Biennale; Taus Makhacheva from Dagestan, perennially questioning boundaries with her work; and the Bosnian-Austrian artist and architectural historian Azra Akšamija, Director of the MIT Future Heritage Lab and noted for her work on cultural and religious identity in conflicts (especially in the recent history of the Bosnian War).
Bauer is also aiming to stress continuity by commissioning work from an older generation of artists in the biennial: the prolific Saudi artist and author Abdulrahman Al-Soliman is 69, Sudan’s Ibrahim El-Salahi is now 93, the Palestinian artist, educator, cultural promoter and role model Samia Zaru was born in 1938.
So far it looks like a great show. The provisional list of artists is here; the 2024 edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale takes place from 20 February to 24 May 2024.
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