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Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2026, installation view, Daniel Lind-Ramos, Ambulancia (2020), 2022–23. Photo by Alessandro Brasile, courtesy of the Diriyah Biennale Foundation
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Edited by Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed, the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2026 unfolds as a choreography in various movements, inspired by the flows, migrations, and transformations that have long connected the Arab region with the world. This guidebook is both companion and score to the Biennale, tracing its unfolding rhythms across sites, performances, conversations, and forms. The Biennale’s five movements—A Procession, Disjointed Choreographies, A Hall of Chants, A Collective Observation, and A Forest of Echoes—unfold within the extensive converted warehouses and outdoor spaces of the Diriyah Biennale Foundation in the JAX District, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, featuring nearly seventy artists working across generations and geographies.
Reflecting this breadth, the guidebook offers an illustrated record of In Interludes and Transitions, including images of newly commissioned works alongside documentation of key artistic contributions. Conceived as both a tool and an extension of the Biennale experience, the publication invites readers to move through the exhibition’s interludes and transitions long after the works themselves have been encountered.
The catalogue is available in English and Arabic.
Below you can read an excerpt from the essay by Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed featured in the publication.
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Rohini Devasher, From the Dust of This Planet, 2026. Commissioned by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation for the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2026. Courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco; the artist
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In Interludes and Transitions
Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed
The third edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (organized by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation in the JAX District, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, January 30 to May 2, 2026) considers the world as a multitude of processions, taking as its point of departure the movements, migrations, and transformations that have long connected the Arab region with the world.
The nomadic and Bedouin communities from the region defined their relationship with the world through the aeolian, wind-driven rhythms of the desert, migratory kinships, and through shared language and oral traditions. Knowledge of the movement of stars and winds, the location of water sources, and animal behavior were their technologies of navigation, survival, and sustenance.
Processions have also been an integral component of life in the region for centuries; trade, pilgrimage, migration have been carriers and producers of cultural forms. These processions were bearers of stories, songs, rhythms, and languages. The rajaz, one of the earliest poetic meters in the Arabic verse, is synched to the camel’s rhythmic step across long journeys.
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Kamala Ibrahim Ishag, Procession (Zaar), 2015. Courtesy of Kamala Ibrahim Ishag. Photo: Mohamed Nour Eldin
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The titles of the Biennale evoke a world in transition. The Biennale’s title in Arabic, fil hil wal terhal, draws from a phrase often used colloquially to evoke connection and continuity within a state of constant flux. It recalls the pause and movement that characterizes nomadic life, while invoking the solidarity and communal ties that stay connected throughout. The English title, In Interludes and Transitions, carries these meanings, but also connects to registers of music, composition, and theater. It is an invitation to think rhythmically, to approach time as layered, pulsating, and collectively embodied. Rather than considering pause and motion in opposition, the Biennale approaches them as generative of cycles of itinerancy.
To live in interludes and transitions is to rethink the world in intense motion, as a choreography that entangles humans with planetary, multispecies, spiritual, and technological currents. It is to think of relations not as a static constellation, but as an ensemble of moving vectors. Thinking of our times through these movements is to partake in moments of commemoration and in movements of solidarity. It proposes to retell fragments of exiled stories that have persisted through bodies, materials, and rhythms. In these movements, the world is always in translation, and everything in it always in a state of becoming something else.
To regard the world in procession is to perceive history as a continuum of multiple timelines (human, planetary, and mythic) rather than a fixed chronology. Histories in procession gesture toward an embodied practice, where the past does not recede but strides alongside the present. They celebrate the collective over the individual, ritual over the record, process over outcome, the granular over the monumental. As a choreography that is both prefigured and yet improvised, processions inscribe meaning onto the landscape. Imbuing the route itself with memory, a procession is how societies make meaning in motion. Every procession has the capacity to blur hierarchies, alter inherited forms, and express new solidarities. Every procession is an affective claim to presence.
CONTINUE READING
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Eric Gyamfi, Flowers for Rebecca, 2026. Commissioned by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation for the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2026. Courtesy of the artist
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