"Formafantasma's exhibition design reworks the raw industrial architecture of JAX into an environment of color and curved planes. Across 12,900 square meters of halls, courtyards, and terraces, walls bend and passages open, guiding visitors through the biennale as if following a score. The scenography avoids monumentality in favor of rhythm, encouraging a bodily awareness of movement that mirrors the curatorial emphasis on itinerancy."
"Led by Co-Artistic Directors Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed, the biennale frames the world as a set of overlapping processions. The curatorial concept draws from a colloquial Arabic expression that speaks to cycles of encampment and journey, using it to think through migration, transmission, and transformation across time. Rather than fixing histories in place, the exhibition allows them to circulate through sound, gesture, and collective memory, tracing how the Arab region has long been shaped by flows of people, trade, and ideas."
The Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2026 occupies the JAX District until May 2, activating former industrial halls, courtyards, and terraces across 12,900 square meters. Formafantasma reshapes the raw architecture into colored, curved planes that bend walls and open passages to create a continuous spatial journey that privileges rhythm and bodily movement. The biennale presents 68 artists from over 37 nations with more than 25 new commissions and centers movement, migration, and transmission as methods. Curatorial leadership frames overlapping processions and cyclical journeys, while musicality and procession—such as Mohammed Alhamdan's Folding the Tents—foreground oral and aural forms of social history.
Read at designboom | architecture & design magazine
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