Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2026 positions procession as a methodology of movement, memory and transformation in a rapidly shifting Saudi Arabia
Yussed Agbo-Ola (Olaniyi Studio), AGBA:8 Stone Cave. © Suzette Bell-Roberts
The 2026 edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, titled In Interludes and Transitions, opened in Riyadh on 30 January with a gesture that felt more like an invocation than an inauguration. A procession of Toyota pickup trucks carrying celebratory Saudi men and women moved through the Wadi Hanifah, musicians performing from the truck beds as engines hummed in rhythmic accord. Vehicles roared alongside camels, conjuring a striking continuity between ancestral and contemporary modes of passage.
Conceived by Saudi artist Mohammed Alhamdan and titled Folding the Tents, 2026, the work drew inspiration from historic Bedouin caravans. The parade culminated in the Biennale Foundation’s main courtyard with a performance by Palestinian rapper Shabjdeed, collapsing geographies through sound. This opening chapter, A Procession, announced the curatorial proposition with clarity. Procession here is not spectacle but a way of knowing shaped by movement, exchange and return.
Artistic directors Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed, working alongside curators Maan Abu Taleb, May Makki, Kabelo Malatsie and Lantian Xie, ground the biennale in perspectives shaped within the Gulf. Resisting the format of a geographic survey, the exhibition positions migration, trade and circulation as structuring principles. Movement becomes both a lived condition and a conceptual framework, attentive to how histories travel and identities are continually reconfigured.
Installation view. © Suzette Bell-Roberts
Saudi Arabia is transforming at a remarkable pace, yet the biennale refuses to adopt a narrative of rupture. As Ahmed remarked during the opening, this is not folklore. The population is young and hyperconnected, acutely aware of global currents while remaining embedded in local memory. The exhibition’s Global South orientation underscores solidarities that bypass traditional cultural centres, foregrounding shifting ties between regions.
Unfolding across five chapters at Jax District, the biennale is arranged with a poetic sensibility that evokes a nomadic journey. Works appear in intuitive constellations, inviting viewers to drift and recalibrate. In Disjointed Choreographies, Petrit Halilaj’s monumental installation Very volcanic over this green feather, suspends colourful felt birds and bucolic scenes overhead. On their reverse, scenes of bombings and violence emerge, exposing the fragility beneath pastoral memory. The past presses insistently upon the present.
Petrit Halilaj, Disjointed Choreographies. © Suzette Bell-Roberts
Throughout the exhibition, artists confront trauma with gestures of endurance. Procession becomes a metaphor for survival. As the artistic directors noted, in this region, the movement of winds, trade routes, migrants, and exiles has long carried stories, songs, and languages, generating rhythms that shape collective life.
This proposition resonates in A Hall of Chants, where cultural transmission is staged under pressure. Rajesh Chaitya Vangad’s Warli painting condenses ritual, labour, migration and celebration into a dense communal field. Drawing implicitly on Gayatri Spivak’s question of who can speak, the chapter probes whose voices are amplified or suppressed. Global movement is approached choreographically, through flows of bodies and speech rather than fixed maps.
Nour Mobarak’s Dafne Phono extends this inquiry through sound. Fifteen singing sculptures composed of mycelium animate the space, their tonal vibrations evoking fungal networks beneath the soil. Mobarak draws parallels between these subterranean systems and linguistic structures, both of which rely on repetition, decay, and regeneration. Language spreads invisibly, connecting distant points through fragile threads.
Nour Mobarak, Dafne Phono. © Brendon Bell-Roberts
The third chapter, A Collective Observation, turns to the mechanisms that structure perception. Maps disorient rather than guide, images resist instant capture, and artworks reach toward the night sky. Cosmology, geology, data and artificial intelligence are treated as contested terrains. Moshekwa Langa’s cartographic compositions layer archival fragments from disparate historical and emotional moments, examining how identities are constructed. Ayman Yousry Daydban revisits mid-twentieth-century Arab film posters, revealing how visual culture negotiated moral and political sensitivities while shaping public consciousness.
Moshekwa Langa, Collapsing Guide. © Suzette Bell-Roberts
In A Forest of Echoes, the biennale returns to sound and poetry while extending its scope into ecological terrain. Forests are framed as dense microhabitats where relations may be generative or violent. Echoes function as carriers of memory across time. Oscar Santillán’s Anthem, commissioned for the biennale, draws inspiration from a Peruvian singer who wove bird calls into her music, collapsing distinctions between human and non-human voice.
Oscar Santillán, Anthem (yellow room). © Suzette Bell-Roberts
Dineo Seshee Bopape’s large-scale interactive installation references the tradition of go fiela mothta, the practice of sweeping the yard, which is gradually disappearing. The repetitive motion of sweeping generates wave-like patterns and gentle sounds, transforming maintenance into meditation. Nearby, Théo Mercier’s monumental sand sculptures conjure a speculative archaeology of the present. Evoking ruined data centres and fossilised vehicles, the installation transforms the gallery into a surreal landscape where sand appears to remember more than stone.
Théo Mercier, House of Eternity. © Brendon Bell-Roberts
The exhibition features work by Pacita Abad, Pio Abad, Rand Abdul Jabbar, Abdullah Miniawy Trio, Etel Adnan, Yussef Agbo Ola, Leen Ajlan, Ahaad Alamoudi, Elyas Alavi, Afra Al Dhaheri, Shadia Alem, Mohammad Al Ghamdi, Mohammed Alhamdan, Nouf Al Harthi, Ramy Alqthami, Abdullah Al Saadi, Ruba Al Sweel, Lulua Alyahya, Ismaïl Bahri, Taysir Batniji, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Raven Chacon, Ayman Yousry Daydban, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Rohini Devasher, Merve Ertufan, Ivana Franke, Rahima Gambo, Eric Gyamfi, Samia Halaby, Petrit Halilaj, Hazem Harb, Aziz Hazara, Ho Rui An, Alana Hunt, Kamala Ibrahim Ishag, Amaka Jaji, Kayfa ta, Yazan Khalili, Moshekwa Langa, Daniel Lind Ramos, George Mahashe, Guadalupe Maravilla, Naminapu Maymuru White, Théo Mercier, Nour Mobarak, Mochu, Nancy Mounir, Hussein Nassereddine, Daniel Otero Torres, Thảo Nguyên Phan, Gala Porras Kim, Sarker Protick, Abdelkarim Qassem, Raqs Media Collective, K P Reji, Faisal Samra, Oscar Santillán, Amina Saoudi Aït Khay, Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Karan Shrestha, Elias Sime, Trương Công Tùng, Rajesh Chaitya Vangad, Wolff Architects, Agustina Woodgate, Müge Yılmaz and Yu Ji.
Diriyah Biennale Foundation CEO Aya Al Bakree has noted that this edition marks the foundation’s fifth biennale in five years, signalling Riyadh’s emergence as a site of international cultural exchange. Interludes and Transition proposes that meaning resides not in arrival but in passage, inviting audiences to inhabit movement as a shared condition of the present.
Suzette Bell-Roberts is the Co-founder and Digital Editor of ART AFRICA magazine.
On view until 2 May 2026, at JAX District, Diriyah, Riyadh. For more information, please visit Diriyah Biennale Foundation.
