Editor’s note: This story originally appeared on On Balance, to ARTnews newsletter on the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.
At the end of last month, I found myself on the outskirts of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in the city of Diriyah, standing in front of the newly opened Museum of Contemporary Art (SAMOCA) and looking at a sight that, as a local arts professional observed. , capture what the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is everything. Before me, I could see the peaceful Wadi Hanifah valley where Diriyah residents gather for leisure activities, to the distant towers of the $10 billion King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) development in downtown Riyadh. SAMOCA is located in Diriyah’s JAX district, a creative hub of warehouses that now house art and film studios but which, until recently, housed car repair shops. Diriyah itself, considered the historical birthplace of the kingdom, is a $63 billion development that will feature several museums and hotels. It all makes a dizzying layer cake of past, present and future.
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I was in Riyadh for the opening of the third annual two-week long Noor Riyadh, an urban festival of light artworks by both Saudi and international artists. The festival could not help but shine a light on the range of projects that are currently being carried out as part of it Crown Prince Mohammed bin SalmanThe broad Vision 2030 initiative to reduce the country’s dependence on oil and diversify the economy.
Weeks before my arrival, news broke that Riyadh would likely host the 2034 World Cup. On the day I arrived, it was announced that the city would host the 2030 World Expo. In Paris, Laurent Le Bonpresident of the Center Pompidou, e Amr Almadani, CEO of the Royal Commission for AlUla, signed a formal agreement to collaborate on a new contemporary art space that will open in AlUla in 2027. At the beginning of next February, the third edition of Desert X AlUla opens, as it will also open in a few weeks then the second edition of the Diriyah Biennale, KSA’s first art biennale, in Riyadh. Then, in two to three years, it will open in AlUla Wadi AlFann (“Valley of the Arts”), a 40-square-mile site with permanent and monumental site-specific works of art. In his studio in the JAX district, Saudi artist Ahmed Mater showed me renderings for his project for Wadi AlFann, a huge structure that produces a mirage.
It can be difficult to remember which entity oversees which project in KSA. SAMOCA, a kunsthalle of 18,000 square meters, is a project of the Commission of Museums, which is in charge of the Ministry of Culture. So is the museum of modern and contemporary art still under development, which, with its permanent collection, will dwarf SAMOCA. The Diriyah Biennial Foundation, also under the Ministry of Culture, is partnering with real estate developer ROSHN, a company set up by the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund to increase home ownership across Saudi Arabia to 70 percent by 2030. Noor Riad , in turn, falls under the Riyadh Art public initiative, which is overseen by the Royal Commission for the City of Riyadh, whose board is chaired by bin Salman. It takes an organization chart just to keep track of everything.
And there’s more: directly across the street from the JAX district, during Noor Riad, the ATHR Foundation opened the eighth and largest edition of its Young Saudi Artists Exhibition, showcasing 25 emerging talents drawn from an open call. The ATHR Foundation was established last year by the founders of the Jeddah-based ATHR gallery, one of KSA’s most prominent commercial spaces, with the mission of helping artists navigate the art system as well as advising local public and private entities on their problems. cultural efforts. The exhibition took place in a residential building called ETHR, which is part of ATHR’s mission to assist arts professionals (both domestic and international) seeking access to JAX resources.
Most of the pieces at Noor Riad were brand new, and several were spectacular, but the one that stole the show for me was an older one: Fühlometer (Feeling meter)a 2008 piece by a German artist Julius von Bismarck in collaboration with the experimental designer Benjamin Rat and filmmaker Richard Wilhelm. On the roof of a KAFD building, von Bismarck had installed a 26-foot-tall smiley face lit with fluorescent tubes. Visible from miles away, and a nice diversion while stuck in traffic on one of the many roads that surround the city, the face changes its expression using software that analyzes people’s expressions picked up on surveillance cameras installed in the area. The face smiles when the city smiles, frowns when the city frowns, and displays every emoji-capable expression in between. The artwork appears to be a direct reference to KAFD’s rapid development as a smart city: In September it was reported that Orange Business, the French telecommunications company that has moved aggressively into big data and AI, has struck a deal that will allow it to build . Geolocation-based sentiment analysis of social media and other features on KAFD’s existing digital infrastructure.
Another moving piece in Noor Riad was in the quiet park Wadi Hanifah, where French artist Bruno Ribeiro erected a 65-foot-tall sculpture of an oil rig in which ominous light patterns coordinated with the sound of an ominous booming techno soundtrack. The piece was called Everything is fine.
It was only as I was leaving KSA that I realized how close I had been, in the JAX district, to a space dedicated to displaying Saudi public mock-ups and computer renderings of The Line, a “110-kilometer-long intelligent linear”. city” that is part of the futuristic, $500 billion, 16,000 square mile NEOM sustainable living project. Unable to visit her, I watched an introduction video of The Line on my phone on the way to the airport, thinking how easy it was to chalk everything up to some kind of utopian, or maybe dystopian, sci-fi fantasy. The project proposes that around 9 million people live in a car-free urban area served by a high-speed rail system. But then at the airport I spoke to a UK consultant/contractor at a Starbucks who claimed to be working on The Line. He had seen trucks there, he told me, he had seen materials. He said “it’s real”.
If, instead of returning to New York, he had taken a two-hour flight east to Dubai, he would have arrived just in time for the start of the UN Climate Summit. In the weeks that followed, the Saudi contingent at the conference went on to lead a group of major oil exporters in resisting a deal that called for a complete phase-out of fossil fuels. (In the end, a compromise agreement was reached that, while still historic, instead calls for a “fossil fuel transition”). New York Timesin a story about the negotiations, pointed out what analysts say is an obvious paradox: “Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is spending tens of billions of dollars to try to diversify the Saudi economy, investing in industries like renewable energy , tourism, entertainment and artificial intelligence.Paradoxically, that means the government needs oil revenue to finance its post-oil life plans.
