The second Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, which opened in Riyadh February 20, comes to a close in late May after a busy and popular run. Featuring 177 works by 100 international artists, the show, “After Rain,” reflects “a sense of revitalization and renewal, calling to mind the refreshing scent of the air when rain has fallen,” according to the print catalogue. Metaphorically echoing ideas of regeneration and change in Saudi Arabia’s social and cultural developments, the show’s theme also more literally contemplates the necessity of water for all life on Earth and the relationship of this resource to the desert environment of Saudi Arabia and other countries.

Under the creative direction of international curator and Singapore’s NTU Centre for Contemporary Art founding director, Ute Meta Bauer, the exhibition, which spans several warehouses in Riyadh’s JAX District as well as open spaces and courtyards in the surrounding area, explores topics such as “the complexity of the environmental crisis and the aftermath of colonialism and extractivism, questions about heritage and conservation, and the sophistication of craft traditions using natural materials.”

Divided across several venues, this multisensory biennale gathers regional and international artists to ponder how communities heal amid collective hardship, how memory and tradition can provide comfort amid rapid change, and how collaborative problem-solving can offer alternative solutions to shared challenges like access to clean water, postwar trauma, and the ongoing consequences of colonialism. Drawing on Ute’s extensive experience in Southeast Asia, the biennale also features a range of artists from the Global South, recentering global artistic narratives by amplifying connections between Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean networks.

Among the many artists participating in this year’s exhibition, pioneering and contemporary Gulf-born or Gulf-based artists stand out for their perceptive interpretation and localization of the show’s themes. Their installations, multimedia visual work, and performances offer viewers a chance to better grasp the evolving regional landscape.

Memory and Materiality

A thread that ties together many of the works of art and projects within “After Rain” is the examination of memory and history in search of guidance through contemporary traumas, destruction, and loss. Works by renowned Gulf artists, such as Dana Awartani, Sara Abdu, and Reem Al Nasser, draw on natural materials and narratives from around the Arab world and Indian Ocean region to contemplate “the complex and often violent histories and circulation routes of natural resources.”

Reem Al Nasser is a Saudi artist born and raised in the southern port city of Jizan, a place that deeply influences her creative work. While her practice often looks at human death and the sociocultural rituals that surround it, as well as “the symbols and ways of things, and their meaning in history, astronomy, and archeology,” Reem’s contribution to the biennale, “Blue Windows” (2022), instead examines ecological death.

Her installation consists of charred juniper tree branches encaged in two intricate blue frames. The juniper tree, the branches of which the artist sourced from the mountainous Aseer province in southern Saudi Arabia, is an important natural resource in Abha, typically used in ceremonies and to make juniper tar oil and furniture. However, a fire in Al Jarrah Park in 2021 devastated a lot of greenery in the area, leaving behind charred remnants of the native tree.

In this work, Reem creates a memorial for the juniper tree, its bright blue, embellished coffin resembling the traditional windows of Abha, a color that Reem told AGSIW she believes “is a symbol that expresses the gates of heaven or the blue Ishtar Gate” to the inner city of Babylon. With the cage-like frames and tree charring in her installation, Reem also sees the juniper’s remnants as “a phoenix bird, who dies and lives from his ashes … a symbolic bird full of secrets, transformations, and change.” She added, “This is what I am witnessing in the Aseer region.”

The mournful, somber tone surrounding Reem’s work, as well as the works of other artists in this gallery at the biennale, reflects a deep sense of care and empathy for the ecology of the artist’s hometown. Reem explained, “The concept of this tragic work is rejecting the loss of the departed, as if the departed wanted to be revived, as if it rejected to leave these forests in a tragic way, as if a funerary farewell were being given to it.”

Another work in the “Knowledge in Material and Spiritual Intelligence” gallery is a three-tower installation made of traditional, handmade sidr powder and camphor crystal soap bars by Jeddah-based artist Sara Abdu. Sara’s installation, “Now That I Have Lost You in My Dreams Where Do We Meet?” similarly calls to mind rituals around death and mourning. The soap’s “two ingredients,” as Sara explained, “are the smell of death,” owing to their use in Islamic rituals of corpse washing.

Sara told AGSIW, “In this work, a ritual for the living becomes a site for poetic intervention,” as well as a site for “contemplation, reconciliation, and remembrance.” The installation’s title, which is a question that the artist has often asked herself, “looks at intangible spaces, such as dreams, as spaces where new memories can be created, which offers a sense of consolation.”

“In a way, the work is a gentle rebellious act against the reality of mortality through a solid soap structure, an attempt to prevent memory from slipping away,” Sara continued. While the stable, alternating brick-like layout of the soap bars recalls how soap is often laid to cure in traditional soap factories, the gaps remaining between the bars conversely leave room for memories to waft away, reflecting the often-unstable structures and frameworks of memory.

Like Reem’s installation, Sara’s towers use natural materials in a multisensorial way to capture and process a traumatic moment, whether in a personal or collective history, offering viewers “connections that facilitate emotional processing and catharsis,” Sara reflected.

Community Efforts in Environmental Consciousness

Perhaps tying more literally to the exhibition’s theme, another section of the show, “Water and Habitats,” examines the “existential necessity” of water for all life forms as well as the threats posed by dwindling access to clean water in many parts of the world. The works in this gallery also explore the ways that water as a resource has been conserved and shared and, conversely, how it has been misused and weaponized.

Alia Farid, a Kuwaiti Puerto Rican installation artist and filmmaker, presents “In Lieu of What Was,” consisting of five sculptures molded after Kuwaiti public water fountains and films depicting life in the marshlands of Iraq, where the oil industry has left irreversible damage on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Alia’s fountains are shaped after water towers, traditional clay jugs, and modern plastic bottles and are inspired by the Kuwaiti water fountains, known as “maa sabeel” meaning “water of the street,” dotting the country’s urban landscape and providing drinking water to the public. These fountains are often erected around private homes, near schools, and on street corners to honor deceased loved ones through ongoing charity, reflecting a sense of community in the face of collective difficulty.

At the same time, Alia’s work alludes to the historical conditions that have rendered access to water in Kuwait and other Gulf countries difficult due to dwindling ground and spring water reserves, instead creating a reliance on desalinated water transported and supplied via extensive pipelines. The installation, coupled with the accompanying films, stresses the importance of access to freshwater, which is often limited in places with low precipitation and high levels of heat-induced evaporation like Kuwait.

Glimpses of the Future

Also featured in the biennale is renowned Saudi artist and cultural pioneer Ahmed Mater who collaborated with Italian filmmaker and photographer Armin Linke for the photographic installation “Saudi Futurism.” The collaboration draws on Armin’s documentary practice examining globalization, urbanization, and industrialization around the world while relying on Ahmed’s more conceptual practice that chronicles Saudi histories and lived realities.

For the biennale, Ahmed and Armin present a series of photographs taken across the kingdom, at sites including a dairy farm, the Aramco archives, a Neom exhibition, and a supercomputer stationed at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, to document the tangible products of technological, scientific, and industrial innovation in the country.

The duo’s multisized images are displayed, at different heights, as an archival maze and printed onto discarded materials from other exhibitions held at the biennale site. On the backs of each plate are details of the image displayed, serving as archival markers to the moments being captured. Additionally, many of the panels feature text, resembling factory-printed wording, with themes such as “Not Yet Existing Archives,” “Sci-fi,” and “CyberPunk.” The vertical railings to which the images are attached enable the images to “theoretically … be switched out or ‘reloaded,’” reflecting the ever-evolving technological and industrial landscape that necessitates rapid and constant adaptation.

In many ways, the exhibition captures a unique moment in the Gulf, observed through various creative and material lenses. Environmental crises, technological innovation, and social change have engendered new conditions and lived realities, which the featured artists have attempted to grapple with or chronicle through their work. While localizing the show’s broader themes to the regional context, the works by Gulf artists also tell a story about colonialism, environmental degradation and fragility, economic exchange, and social change that resonates globally.