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The third edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale opened to the public on January 30, 2026, marking the return of Saudi Arabia’s flagship contemporary art platform set in the JAX District at Diriyah. Titled “في الحِلّ والترحال” / In Interludes and Transitions, the Biennale runs through May 2nd, 2026 and brings together more than 65 artists from over 37 countries, alongside more than 25 newly commissioned works.
Organised by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation and led by Co-Artistic Directors Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed, the 2026 edition unfolds across JAX’s former industrial buildings, positioned just outside the UNESCO World Heritage Site of At-Turaif. Razian, Deputy Director and Head of Exhibitions and Programmes at Art Jameel in Jeddah and Dubai, brings an institutional and regional curatorial practise rooted in long-term research and public programming, while Ahmed, a curator, cultural theorist, and educator, and Projects Advisor at Dubai’s Ishara Art Foundation contributes a practice shaped by transnational histories, pedagogy, and experimental exhibition-making. Together, their collaboration frames the Biennale as a space for movement, exchange, and knowledge transmission rather than a fixed curatorial narrative.
Titled In Interludes and Transitions / “في الحِلّ والترحال”, the Biennale takes its name from a colloquial expression tied to cycles of settlement and journeying central to nomadic life in the Arabian Peninsula. Rather than framing movement as interruption, the exhibition positions it as a continuous state, one that sustains connection, exchange, and cultural memory. Across the Biennale, processions emerge not only as human acts but as entanglements between environmental forces, technologies, spiritual traditions, and multi-species worlds, proposing motion as a shared condition rather than a singular path.
Set within the historic landscape of Diriyah, the Biennale draws on the long histories of movement and exchange that have linked the Arab region to wider global contexts. The exhibition brings together artistic practises shaped by the social and ecological pressures of the last two decades, positioning art as a way of thinking through instability and change. As Co-Artistic Directors Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed observe: “Processions have produced relations and forms in this region. The movement of winds and the flow of trade, migration, and exile are carriers of stories, songs, and languages, producing rhythms and poetic metres such as the rajaz (رَجَز). Thinking of the world in procession, a braiding of movements that commemorate and celebrate, allows an understanding of cultural forms through exchange and transmissions; itineraries of travel, intersections, and mutations; and retelling fragments of exiled stories that have persisted through bodies, materials, rhythms, and cadences.”
The exhibition considers movement across geographies, histories, and forms of knowledge as a central condition of life in the Arab region and beyond. Conceived as a series of processions rather than a fixed narrative, In Interludes and Transitions draws on the rhythms of travel, migration, trade, and exile. Histories are not treated as static records but as living transmissions carried through sound, gesture, language, and collective memory. Across painting, installation, film, music, and performance, the Biennale proposes movement itself as a way of understanding how cultures are formed, disrupted, and sustained.
The exhibition design, developed by Italian design studio Formafantasma, transforms JAX’s industrial architecture into a fluid, navigable landscape. Colour, curved walls, and layered planes guide visitors through more than 12,900 square metres of indoor and outdoor spaces, including courtyards and terraces, creating a continuous flow between artworks.
Musicality plays a central role throughout the Biennale, foregrounding oral and aural traditions as critical modes of knowledge transmission. This emphasis is reflected in Folding the Tents (2026), a newly commissioned procession by Saudi artist Mohammed Alhamdan (7amdan). Moving through Wadi Hanifah and the JAX District, the work culminates in a performance by the Miniawy Trio. Supported by Lexus, the project explores how ancient performative practises adapt within contemporary electronic and digital cultures, drawing connections between inherited gestures and present-day forms.
Aya Al-Bakree, CEO of the Diriyah Biennale Foundation, described the opening as a milestone moment for the institution: “It gives me great pleasure to welcome audiences from near and far to the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2026. The 2026 edition marks the foundation’s fifth biennale since its inception five years ago, and documents a remarkable breadth of artistic practises from across regions and disciplines, and it speaks to an exciting moment in artistic activity around the world, with more centres of work and thinking gaining greater visibility. We are grateful for the continued opportunity to platform artists, drive cultural exchange, and invest in our community. That this exhibition is taking place at JAX District, our home in Diriyah, demonstrates our role as a convener and incubator of creativity in Saudi Arabia and far beyond.”
Razian and Ahmed frame the Biennale as an invitation to experience art as something encountered in motion rather than consumed in isolation. “With the opening of In Interludes and Transitions, we invite audiences to move through and with the biennale, and experience a range of artworks, ideas, and propositions that speak to our world today – a world in flux, in movement, in constant procession, and to share in an invocation of the world shaped not by fixity, but by itinerancy; not by single points of origins, but by overlapping vectors of routes, rhythms, and relations.”
Alongside the exhibitions, the Biennale’s public programme extends these ideas through talks and conversations that examine media, memory, and cultural transmission. On January 31st from 7PM to 7:45 PM, Archives to Algorithms: Media, Memory, and Making Publics brings together Kayfa ta and artist-researcher Ruba Al-Sweel, moderated by curator Maan Abu Taleb, to explore how print, publishing, and digital circulation shape contemporary art practice in the Arab world.
Later that evening from 8PM to 8:45 PM, a talk titled Media in Transition examines how artists across generations revisit cinema, television, theatre, and digital media as speculative tools for the present, with contributions from Ayman Yousry Daydban, Hussein Nassereddine, and Ahaad Alamoudi, led by curator and architectural designer Mona Al-Jadir.
The 2026 edition features works by the late Pacita Abad and Etel Adnan, alongside a group of established and midcareer artists including Raven Chacon, Dineo Seshee Bopape (Raisibe), Gala Porras-Kim, and Petrit Halilaj. They appear alongside a younger generation of practitioners, among them Lulua Alyahya, Ho Rui An, and the Saudi publishing initiative Kayfa ta, reinforcing the Biennale’s interest in intergenerational exchange.
Taking place in a moment of accelerated cultural production in the Kingdom, the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale positions itself not as a survey of contemporary art, but as a space for testing how histories circulate, fracture, and reassemble. In foregrounding movement across bodies, materials, and media, the Biennale reflects a region shaped less by fixed origins than by continual transition.
The Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2026 opens 30 January 2026 at JAX District in Diriyah, northwest of Riyadh, and runs until 2 May 2026.
