A small crowd gathered on the harbor at Kello, a fishing village in the municipality of Haukipudas, the anticipation building as the top of the hour drew near. At 10 o’clock sharp, a recording of the local fisherwoman Elina Halonen spoke a single word into the morning air: “Miehiään”—of their men. It was the latest installment of a reading of Pentti Saarikoski’s Finnish translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, broadcast from a sculpture on the harbor wall at a rate of one word an hour, a pace at which the whole epic will take 10 years to tell. It is a fitting way into “Climate Clock,” a permanent art trail spread across the Oulu region as part of Oulu’s year as European Capital of Culture 2026, which asks us to tune in to a slower, deeper sense of time than the one most of us carry around in our pockets.

That same day, we sat down to a lunch of spinach soup and Karelian-style pies filled with rice porridge in a church hall in Ylikiiminki, a few hundred yards from one of the trail’s other works. It was a minor moment in a packed two-day itinerary, but it has stayed with me as a kind of encapsulation of the whole project: down-to-earth, made with and for the people who live there, and entirely uninterested in performing for an audience that might not even be paying attention (yet).

“Climate Clock” is among the flagship projects of Oulu2026, the year-long program marking Oulu’s status as European Capital of Culture. Oulu, a city of just over 200,000 people a little south of the Arctic Circle, is the urban heart of a region of 40 municipalities spanning roughly 30 percent of Finland’s land area—an area warming, according to the scientists involved, at around four times the global average. Curated by Alice Sharp, artistic director of the U.K. organization Invisible Dust, and produced by Claudia Woolgar, the project paired six Finnish and international artists with scientists working on the environmental questions most pressing to their assigned corner of the region, their works found at sites ranging from a Stone Age settlement to a highway underpass. A seventh work, made in collaboration with local communities, embraces the whole region.

A trail shaped by ice, clay and lichen

In Oulu’s central square, Rana Begum has installed No. 1574 Stone, a series of granite and marble shards—spectrolite blue, Baltic brown, pale green Lapland marble—cut to resemble fragments of breaking sea ice. One face of each piece is painted in silver metallic, evoking the sheen of melting glaciers; the other is polished smooth enough to reflect the sky and the people walking past. Begum developed the work with the University of Oulu glaciologist Alun Hubbard, whose footage of collapsing Greenland ice she has described as scary and yet beautiful. Sharp points out that the Arctic could be ice-free in summer by 2040—a fact that gives Begum’s glittering, fractured forms an unsettling undertone even on a bright June afternoon.

An hour or so north, at the Kierikki Stone Age Centre in Yli-Ii, Ranti Bam’sIlé-Ìlá sits beside the still water of a lake: a family of large clay vessels, shaped by the pressure of the artist’s own body, set on a Douglas fir platform. Bam, who has British and Nigerian heritage and lives in Paris, was struck by the Stone Age pottery shards held in the museum’s collection, some still bearing the fingerprints of the people who made them thousands of years ago. Working with the physical geographer Jan Hjort, who showed her how this stretch of land has been slowly rising out of the sea since the last ice age, Bam arrived at the idea that clay and landscape are doing the same thing, on different timescales. How we hold the earth, she has said, shapes what remains.

Where Bam’s vessels sit beside calm water, at the Koiteli rapids in Kiiminki the river (outside of winter, at least) runs fast and loud, and Antti Laitinen’s Olet Tässä (You Are Here) responds with something playful and almost delicate rather than monumental: circular viewing windows woven from twisted branches frame views of the water, while two large spheres—juniper, seeded with a “cocktail” of local lichen—turn slowly in the wind like miniature planets. Laitinen, who is Finnish and grew up nearby, worked with the botanist Jouko Rikkinen on the lichen, a notoriously slow-growing organism and a reliable indicator of air quality. Some of it will die; some will spread and eventually cover the spheres completely. The artist said simply that he doesn’t know what will happen to the work—”nature will decide.”

Back in Ylikiiminki, a few steps from our lunch table, Takahiro Iwasaki’s giant tar barrel is full of snowflakes. Built with local carpenters using traditional methods, it nods to the area’s history of tar-making and to the symmetrical, neoclassical church next door, designed by the Finnish architect Jacob Rijf—a building whose drawings, Iwasaki noticed, share something of the geometry of a snow crystal. Inside, he has carved his own snowflakes, meant to be viewed through peepholes as though magnified under a microscope. The peepholes themselves are set at different heights to track hanki kanto, the hard crust that can form on top of deep snow and is strong enough to walk on; when it’s thick enough, in winter, visitors will be able to look down into the barrel from above and peer through the upper peepholes. There are 112 snowflakes inside—112 being, as Iwasaki likes to point out, the number Finns dial in an emergency. His hope is straightforward: take care of the environment, and nobody will ever need to call it.

Over in Oulunsalo, on a stretch of road leading to the airport, Gabriel Kuri has transformed an underpass and roadside, placing sliced and reassembled boulders amid the relatively urban landscape and painting lampposts in the green-to-red gradient of a standard risk-assessment chart, developed with the climate scientist Kevin Anderson. It is, on the face of it, the most legible of the six works: many of us have filled in a form using these colors, and we all know what red means. But Kuri framed it as an example of a working method he returns to again and again—taking something intangible, an experience or an idea and compressing it into something concrete, a number or a color or a chart. “Some kind of circular motion,” though, he suggested, is built into the work’s very title: Risk Assessing Risk Assessment loops back on itself the same way a risk chart does, with its colors running from cool greens at the bottom up through yellow and orange to a hot red at the top, only to be quietly disregarded by the people making the decisions.

“Climate Clock’s” works all foster a slowing down and deep reflection, but, the truth be told, Superflex’s Super Kello isn’t even really for us. Developed with the behavioral ecologist Alex Jordan, its blocks—cut from a single piece of pink-veined stone—are shaped using an algorithm that maximizes surface area: good for humans to sit on, but designed, as Superflex’s Rasmus Nielsen explained, with another audience in mind. Fish, he said, are the group’s new collaborators, and the sculpture’s pink color was chosen because, in a few hundred years, coral polyps drifting north as the Baltic warms might be drawn to it. It is the same sculpture that broadcasts the recording of Halonen reading The Odyssey, one word an hour: a piece of art made, in part, for an audience of fish, and addressed to a future 10 years, or a few hundred years, away.

A clock of moments

If the six permanent works each anchor “Climate Clock” to a single place, the seventh element—The Most Valuable Clock in the World, by the longtime collaborators Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, both Finnish—is the thread running through all of them. Over several years, the duo held a series of “Dinners for Twelve” in local communities, asking residents what they valued about their daily lives and their local environment. The results were built, together with a team of eight local volunteers with no prior clockmaking experience, into a large mechanical-electronic clock: an hour hand made up of 12 short films about threatened local species and habitats, produced with regional scientists; a minute hand of 60 “valuable moments” donated by residents, from a family’s tradition of walking in the snow in wool socks to an ice-dancing team’s practice; and a second hand of more than 100 fleeting clips sent in from people’s phones. The clock is now touring all six “Climate Clock” sites before heading on to museums in Tornio and Hämeenlinna. It will become a “time capsule,” Kalleinen said, capturing what life in Oulu looked like in 2025 and what people valued.

It is worth pausing on how unusual all this is. Several of these artists have represented their countries at the Venice Biennale—known as much for its spectacle as its prestige. Yet here their works are, embedded in Finnish suburbia or wild nature, working alongside snow hydrologists and lichen specialists most of the art world will never meet. Sharp has described the project as an attempt to step outside the ordinary tyranny of clock time and into something else: a space, as she put it, “between the tick and the tock,” where entire new worlds can be imagined. That is more or less what each of these seven works asks visitors to do, whether it’s standing in front of a giant ceramic vessel, peering into a barrel of carved snowflakes, or waiting on a harbor wall for the next word of an epic poem. Whether a pause like that is enough to change how a region this remote and this rapidly warming is seen, by its own residents or by the rest of the world, is another question. But for a couple of days in June, in a church hall with spinach soup, or on a harbor wall waiting for one word an hour, Oulu felt like exactly the right place to ask it.

More exhibition reviews

• At Marianne Boesky, Sanford Biggers Rewrites the Rules of Material Storytelling

• What’s Left to Learn from Marcel Duchamp?

• In Dancehall and Reggaetón’s Evolution, MCA Chicago Charts a Global Awakening

• Our Take On “Lucas Samaras – Sitting, Standing, Walking, Looking” at the Art Institute of Chicago

• Cy Twombly’s Drawing and Discovery

• Why You Should Catch “Bellezza e Bruttezza” at Bozar in Brussels 

The scent hits you before anything else. Stepping into Manuel Mathieu’s corner of the Arsenale at the 61st Venice Biennale, you enter a low-lit room and are met by a warm, earthy fragrance: vetiver, sourced from Haiti, blended into something unexpectedly comforting. It took me a moment to place it, but the aromatic tingle of it eventually landed somewhere specific—the Vicks VapoRub my mother used to rub on my chest when I had a cold as a child, that powerful, enveloping sensation of being looked after. The immersive installation unfolding around you, Pendulum (2025), though, is more haunting than comforting.

Haitian-Canadian artist Mathieu is one of the few participants in this year’s Biennale showing in both the Arsenale and the Giardini—a feat that speaks to the breadth and ambition of a practice encompassing painting, mosaic, ceramics, film and olfactory art. Invited by late curator Koyo Kouoh, whose theme “In Minor Keys” privileges quiet forms of resistance over grand declaration, Mathieu’s debut at the world’s most prestigious art exhibition feels perfectly calibrated.

Pendulum began as a short film in 2023—winning the top prize at FIFA that year before touring to the New Orleans Film Festival, the Toronto Biennial of Art and the Pérez Art Museum Miami—before expanding into the immersive installation now presented here. In the Arsenale, it takes the form of a double-sided screen suspended in the darkened space, and combined with four life-size fabric figures lying across the floor, each emitting the vetiver fragrance.

On screen, a woman in a white dress and headdress moves through a forest, the fabric of her garment trailing behind her like a wedding train. At moments she opens the cloak wide—arms outstretched, as if she might take flight; at others she wraps it around herself like armor. When I described her to Mathieu as a bride of history, he lit up. “That’s it,” he said. “And what is she marrying?” It’s a question the work deliberately refuses to answer. The dress itself—or one almost identical to it—stands nearby on a mannequin, a cinematic relic made suddenly three-dimensional.

The film cuts, and we are in a field. A group of men maneuver a large white sheet between them, tossing and folding it around objects that turn out to be broken dolls akin to those in the space in the Arsenale—limbs scattered and dismembered. The action is repetitive, exhausting and strangely familiar; it recalled, for me, those parachute games from school P.E. lessons, where the point was collective coordination and the rules were never entirely clear. The men don’t speak to each other. They don’t appear to be communicating at all. They keep going anyway. “They could stop at any time, but they don’t,” Mathieu said. For him, the loop is the message: the inability of individuals to articulate their inner experience to one another is precisely what keeps the cycle turning.

The dolls mean different things to different people—one of the actors saw them as white souls; another was too uncomfortable to name them. For Mathieu, they represent psychological burdens. The question is not what they are but how each person chooses to carry them. The woman who opens the film, walking with the weight of all that fabric, passes it on. The men receive it and don’t know what to do with it. The vetiver, sourced through a fragrance house with access to Haitian-grown material, was designed to make you want to stay inside that uncertainty. “A smell that would embrace you,” as Mathieu put it.

The decision to pair so potentially confrontational a film with something so physiologically soothing is the work’s masterstroke. Olfaction bypasses the analytical brain, Mathieu argues, going directly to memory and emotion. The fragrance also exists beyond the gallery walls—Mathieu is the founder of Manuel Mathieu Parfums, and the vetiver blend is available as a candle, meaning visitors can carry not just the memory of the exhibition but its atmosphere into their homes. Some will carry it more literally: the scent lingers on skin and clothing long after you leave, which feels entirely intentional for a work whose central argument is that history does not stay where you left it.

Moving from the Arsenale to the Giardini, the scale and medium shift but the preoccupations remain constant. Physicality (2023) comprises 14 vases at various stages of collapse—forms caught in a state of flux, vacillating and dissolving, as if what they once contained has already begun to slip away. Handmade during a residency in Jingdezhen, China, they are deliberately imperfect, the visible marks of making (literal handmarks) preserved in the surface. Mathieu describes the firing process as a metaphor for transformation—how heat creates new forms, causes cracks, and can destroy while preserving essential elements. His team, he noted, broke an entire clay oven in the process because the works were too dense. They function like archaeological fragments, suggesting buried histories rather than illustrating them, and they demand a different kind of attention than the paintings: you want to reach out and feel the weight of them.

That same earthy, geological quality carries into Abundance and Drought (2024), a large-scale mosaic that from a distance reads as something parched and elemental—cracked terrain, almost skull-like in its contours—before drawing you closer, where the patient accumulation of thousands of hand-assembled fragments gradually reveals itself. The work was developed as part of the research for Le Mont habité, Mathieu’s permanent commission of five monumental mosaics for Montréal’s REM transit network. “The slowness isn’t imposed,” Mathieu said, “but emerges from the work’s inherent complexity.” Both works share a sense of time made visible in material—the labor is the meaning—and in an exhibition context that often rewards spectacle and speed, that feels like a position as much as a process.

The paintings that surround it—Self Preservation (2025), In the Heart of the Revolution II (2025) and the new Genocide (2026)—are built from layers of canvas, paper, paint and, increasingly, burned fabric, a material Mathieu has incorporated into his practice over the past several years. La fenêtre (2025) and The Veil (2025) both use hanging strips of fabric alongside or fused into the painted surface, creating thresholds rather than fixed images: figures appear distorted, as if seen through glass or through the scrim of memory itself. In The Veil, scorched cotton is pressed directly into the paint, obscuring and perforating the image beneath. The fabric carries a specific historical charge—cotton is inseparable from the economies of enslaved labor—and to burn it is to refuse its original function, to transform a material of exploitation into something else: a scar, a rupture, a refusal.

Genocide stopped me in my tracks—not least because of the context in which I encountered it. The day before the Biennale’s official opening, the Art Not Genocide Alliance coordinated walkouts across at least a dozen national pavilions in protest against Israel’s participation. To move from that charged atmosphere into a room containing a painting of that title—its surface organized like a degraded grid of archival photographs, faces pressing through layers of fragilized paper only to dissolve into abstraction—was to feel the word’s weight land in real time. Down the right-hand side of the canvas, suspended on a black string, hangs an object curved like a scythe, but with a certain bone-line quality. It is hard to say exactly what it is, and Mathieu seemed content to leave it that way. “It could be an instrument,” he said, “it could be a residue of that violence—a finding from that violence.” The ambiguity is the point: whether it is a tool of killing or a relic of it, something has already happened here.

“It’s an instrument of erasure that is being used more than ever these days,” Mathieu said plainly when we spoke. The painting doesn’t illustrate a single event but situates genocide within a longer continuum, linking the photographic documentation of atrocity to its gradual failure to hold meaning across time: images fade and records become illegible. The faces beneath the surface are present but unidentifiable, echoing Mathieu’s earlier work, 1954/Flats and Sharps (2016), which referenced the year François Duvalier came to power in Haiti, its colorful forms punctured by sanded black voids acting as visual black holes, standing in for lives and narratives erased by violence. Genocide extends that grammar into the present tense. For Mathieu, these are not separate histories but a single pattern, repeating under different names, in different geographies and across centuries.

His practice, across both venues, insists that history is not the past. It is a loop—like the men in the field, like the recurring structures of domination he traces from Haitian dictatorship to contemporary violence—that continues until someone finds the language to name it, or better yet, to stop it. Whether art can provide that language is a question he wisely leaves open. What it can do, this exhibition argues persuasively, is make the loop visible: in the weight of a ceramic vessel, in the slow accumulation of mosaic tiles, in a scrim of burned cotton pressed against paint, in a fragrance that you carry out of the building and into the world.

More in Artists

• Roberto Lugo On Thinking Larger Than Life in Madison Square Park

• Kunstmuseum Basel Puts Helen Frankenthaler Front and Center

• Nick Doyle’s “Mirror, Mirror” Turns the American Dream Inside Out

• A Major Martin Puryear Retrospective Reveals an Artist Who Has Never Stopped Evolving

• Painter Renée Levin’s Unhurried Eye

The opening weekend of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale began not in a gallery but in a dry riverbed. Four-wheel-drive vehicles—known locally as “Chasse”—rumbled through Wadi Hanifah alongside camels, old and new modes of desert transport moving in tandem. Drummers emerged, clicking wooden blocks as they led a growing crowd through the JAX District’s industrial streets, transforming what might have been a standard (and often somewhat stuffy) art opening into something closer to a homecoming parade. The procession culminated in the biennale’s main plaza with a DJ and rap performance by Saudi artist Mohammed Alhamdan, known as 7amdan, whose work explores how ancient Bedouin song traditions collide with contemporary digital culture.

This opening gesture encapsulated the entire exhibition’s animating idea: movement as a generator of culture. “In Interludes and Transitions,” the third edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, takes procession—whether of people, stories, commodities or even bacteria—as both its subject and methodology. Curated by Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed with a team including Maan Abu Taleb, May Makki, Kabelo Malatsie and Lantian Xie, the exhibition gathers roughly 70 artists across five warehouse halls in JAX, a creative district carved from Riyadh’s industrial heritage. The exhibition unfolds through four thematic movements—Disjointed Choreographies, A Hall of Chants, A Collective Observation and A Forest of Echoes—punctuated by what the curators call “arenas,” site-specific installations that create spaces for pause and gathering.

The biennale arrives at a pivotal moment for Saudi Arabia’s cultural landscape. Since the Diriyah Biennale Foundation was established in 2020, more than one million people have visited its two major exhibitions—this contemporary art biennale and the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah. The Ministry of Culture has added 360 cultural professions to the national occupational classification since its inception in 2018, and the sector now contributes over 20 percent more to the economy than it did then. Against this backdrop of rapid expansion, the biennale serves as the Kingdom’s largest platform for contemporary art, where many visitors encounter this kind of cultural space for the first time.

Razian and Ahmed describe their curatorial approach as thinking from this region rather than about it. In conversation, Razian explained that Arabic poetry emerged from the rhythm of moving through the desert, specifically the rajaz meter synced to camel steps. “These long journeys actually created cultural form,” she said. “So the procession itself is a producer of cultural forms.”

That idea manifests spatially through the scenography of Italian design studio Formafantasma, which transforms the industrial warehouses into a composition that feels like it’s levitating. Platforms and walls appear suspended, allowing light and sound to spill between sections. Artworks don’t occupy discrete rooms or sections but exist in a state of productive interference with one another.

The exhibition opens with Petrit Halilaj’s Very volcanic over this green feather (2021), an installation of large-scale reproductions of drawings the artist made at age 13 while in a refugee camp during the Kosovo war. The images—fantastical birds and volcanic mountains interspersed with scenes of violence, including soldiers and tanks—are printed on felt, sprayed with ink and suspended throughout the space. What initially reads as joyful gradually reveals its traumatic substrate, imagination operating as shelter against horror.

“I made these drawings in 1999, while in a refugee camp in Albania during the war, as part of a program organized by the psychologist Angelo, where we were given felt pens and simple paper to draw,” Halilaj told Observer. The drawings depicted both dreams and traumas, but he waited 21 years before showing them publicly again. “Not because I didn’t want to speak, but because I felt there is a responsibility in how we talk about war, conflict and genocide today, especially when images circulate so easily and often without care. I needed time to poetically elaborate these experiences rather than expose them too directly.”

That gap between creation and public presentation speaks to the work’s complexity. Halilaj returned to the same psychologist, Giacomo Poli, two decades later, approaching the large-scale reproductions “almost as a form of psychodrama: not therapy sessions with people, but with drawings, treated as subjects.” The enlarged scale transforms the viewing experience. “We are surrounded by an overwhelming flow of images, often consumed quickly on small screens. By enlarging these childhood drawings, the work slows that experience down.”

Nearby, Daniel Lind-Ramos’s Con-junto (2015) and Ambulancia (2020) (2022-23) celebrate Caribbean music and performance through monumental assemblages of found objects from his native Loíza, Puerto Rico. Con-junto incorporates materials gathered after Hurricane Maria, while Ambulancia, made during the COVID pandemic, takes the shape of a cart equipped with emergency lights, a megaphone and a shovel, all rendered in the dark blues and purples of Puerto Rican funerals. The sculptures embody collective memory at architectural scale, personal artifacts becoming public monuments. Upstairs, Hazem Harb’s Gauze (2023-24) arranges pieces of white medical dressing to form figures resembling mutilated bodies, the material’s name possibly deriving from Gaza, where gauze has been produced for centuries. Since October 2023, Harb has followed documentation of the genocide in Gaza online; here, the gauze evokes the kafan, the white cloth used to shroud bodies before Muslim burial.

The second thematic movement, A Hall of Chants, foregrounds language and vocality. Nour Mobarak’s Dafne Phono (2024) reinterprets the world’s first known opera through 15 mycelium sculptures that “sing” the libretto in rare and endangered languages including Abkhaz, the click language !Xoon and the whistled Silbo Gomero. Word-for-word translations project on the wall, showcasing the diversity of linguistic systems while the fungal network speaks—or perhaps was always speaking, if we chose to listen.

Also in the hall, Daniel Otero Torres’s Echoes of the Earth (2026) constructs an ode to environmental defenders from around the world—Berta Cáceres from Honduras, Ken Saro-Wiwa from Nigeria, and others—through totemic wooden sculptures housed within a large frame alongside embroidered hammocks and water vessels whose surfaces ripple with ambient rainforest sounds. “My wish was to imagine a space where these silent heroes could meet,” Otero Torres told Observer. “A place of pause for travelers, a space for encounter, interaction and exchange.”

Elias Sime’s Lines in Nature (2025) series presents intricate geometric networks assembled from electronic waste—circuit boards, wires and computer keyboards shipped to Africa in staggering volumes. From a distance, the works resemble satellite imagery; up close, they reveal their fragmented origins. Sime, who co-founded the Zoma Museum in Addis Ababa, transforms discarded technology into meditations on the balance between progress and environmental cost. But if Sime excavates technology’s material underside, Kayfa ta’s installation traces its intellectual genealogy from a different angle. Housed in a modular structure designed by AAU ANASTAS, the publishing initiative presents research into the pioneering 1980s Kuwaiti company Sakhr Computers, which localized computing for Arabic, and Saudi internet forums of the 1990s—reminding us that technology’s history doesn’t belong exclusively to Silicon Valley but has multiple, parallel lineages.

Between thematic movements, Théo Mercier’s monumental House of Eternity (2026) occupies an entire hall as one of the biennale’s interior arenas. The French sculptor has transformed the space into a surrealistic landscape where four compacted sculptures rise from loose sand terrain, echoing termite mounds, desert monoliths and the wind-carved architectures of deep time. An elevated metal walkway cuts across the expanse, granting visitors an aerial perspective that reconfigures their relationship to the work. From above, the installation reveals itself as both fragile terrain and immersive stage set—a speculative archaeology of the present where sand seems to remember more than stone. White powdery sediments formed by the sand’s salt content accumulate like digital residue, prompting questions about what images might erupt if our data servers melted down.

Questions of what remains visible—and what gets buried—continue into A Collective Observation, which interrogates how we orient ourselves in the world through diverse knowledge systems and technologies. Moshekwa Langa’s Collapsing Guide (2000-03) series presents cartographic collages on construction plastic where seas appear black rather than blue—mapping reimagined through personal and political subjectivity rather than colonial logic. Taysir Batniji’s Remnants (2024-25) series fixes in oil paint the blurred, lagging images that appear when downloading documentation from Gaza via Telegram, freezing the moment of anticipation before unbearable knowledge arrives. If Batniji catches images at the threshold of visibility, Gala Porras-Kim interrogates what happens once objects have long been on view—her detailed colored-pencil drawings reproducing both sides of a display cabinet from Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, once titled “Treatment of the Dead” and containing shrunken heads and burial objects from diverse cultures. By meticulously rendering these “dead” objects, Porras-Kim questions museum authority while highlighting how history continually reshapes itself through conservation, decay and contemporary intervention.

The final thematic movement, A Forest of Echoes, gathers polyphonous life forms across scales from the cosmic to the bacterial. Raqs Media Collective’s Something Rare to Lose (2026) creates an immersive arena around a convalescence bed, with a breathing mattress and a glass-domed sculpture of lungs. The work foregrounds embodiment at its most fragile, asking who cares for the caregiver while channeling the medical philosophies of Ibn Sina and Al-Biruni. Oscar Santillán’s Anthem (2026) invites visitors to make animal-like sounds into suspended tree burls containing speakers and microphones; a machine learning system responds with hypothetical melodic vocalizations, creating a conversation between organic and artificial intelligence.

Another arena extends the biennale into JAX’s public spaces. Agustina Woodgate’s The Source (2026) comprises three drinking fountains developed through field research in Al Ahsa, the world’s largest oasis, drawing on the region’s 2,000-year-old gravity-based irrigation networks. The fountains deliberately expose their own infrastructure—tanks, pipes, faucets—making visible the hidden journey of Riyadh’s water, which arrives via a 500-kilometer desalination pipeline from the Persian Gulf. “The act of approaching, waiting, touching, and drinking becomes a micro-ritual,” Woodgate told Observer. “The work operates quietly, through repetition and circulation, allowing infrastructure itself to become perceptible—not as spectacle, but as a shared, political condition.”

Throughout, Ahmed explained, the exhibition approaches curation “not archaeologically, not mappingly, not cartographically, but sonically”—attending to echoes, reverberations and the way histories create resonant fields rather than fixed points. This methodology feels particularly urgent in a moment of global upheaval, offering what Razian called “different kinds of stories, different kinds of histories that we can learn from” beyond the bombardment of horrible news.

Ahmed noted the significance of Saudi Arabia launching with a biennale rather than an art fair. “The very first and bold large-scale event for contemporary art in Saudi Arabia is a Biennale. They could have started somewhere else. They could have started with art fairs or auction houses,” he said. “Imagine what it does to the next generation of artists here, whose first encounter—they’re on their roadmap. It’s works that they’re reading and in conversation with in a Biennale rather than in booths of an art fair.”

That commitment to prioritizing cultural infrastructure over the market imperative was reinforced on opening day when the Ministry of Culture announced a partnership between the newly established Riyadh University of Arts and London’s Royal College of Art. “Our collaboration with the Royal College of Art plays a central role in strengthening academic capacity, enabling cultural exchange and developing creative talent across the Kingdom,” Noha Kattan, deputy minister for national partnerships and talent development, told Observer.

I had my doubts about whether the JAX District, located somewhat apart from central Riyadh, would attract audiences beyond those already familiar with contemporary art. Yet the procession that opened the biennale suggested otherwise—streets lined with onlookers, a genuine sense of gathering and collective witness, not to mention a lot of very enthusiastic dancing. In a region where cultural infrastructure is rapidly expanding, the Diriyah Biennale positions itself as a discursive platform, a space where publics are emerging and actively engaged rather than simply addressed.

“In Interludes and Transitions” is on view at JAX District, Diriyah, Riyadh, through May 2, 2026.

More in Art Fairs, Biennials and Triennials

• S.E.A. Focus Gets a Boost from Art SG, But Questions About Identity Remain

• Observer’s February 2026 Art Fair Calendar

• FOG Design + Art Delivers Strong Sales and Institutional Momentum in San Francisco

• A New Collector-Founded Fair, ENZO, Will Launch During L.A. Art Week

• Mexico City, Doha or L.A.? The Answer Depends on What You’re Looking For

• Art Fairs at a Turning Point: Why Galleries Can’t Afford to Go—but Can’t Afford to Stop