The third edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, In Interludes and Transitions, unfolds across the JAX District through May 2, 2026, assembling more than 65 artists from over 37 countries alongside an ambitious slate of new commissions. Led by Co-Artistic Directors Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed, the exhibition resists the conventions of a geographic survey, instead positioning movement defined by migration, exchange, procession – as both its curatorial framework and a defining condition of the contemporary. Here, movement is treated not as metaphor but as a structure through which culture is continuously made and remade.
For Ahmed, the premise begins with the nuances of translation. “In Arabic (titled “في الحِلّ والترحال” ) the theme of the biennale means the cycles of journeys and encampments that have actually defined so many lives of communities, especially the Bedouin communities of the region,” he explains. “The English title… is not a one-to-one translation, but rather a different kind of way of articulating the cycles of itinerancy.” The project, he continues, seeks “to reconsider the world as a multitude of processions,” one shaped by histories and experiences that unfold through motion rather than permanence.
That movement is inherently shared. “None of these movements are individual or solo, they’re collective,” Ahmed notes, describing a “we” formed through the entanglement of human, technological, ecological, and spiritual domains. Installed across nearly 12,900 square metres of exhibition halls, courtyards, and terraces, the biennale privileges a mode of looking grounded in relation rather than sequence – less a procession of discrete objects than an accumulating field of encounters.
What emerges is a biennale attentive not only to circulation across borders, but to the ways memory, material, and embodiment register its effects. The following works stand out for the clarity and urgency with which they engage these conditions.
Pacita Abad, Asian Abstractions (1983–92)
Developed after her training in Korean ink painting, Abad’s series transforms studies of rice stalks into densely layered trapunto canvases, padded, stitched, and embellished into near-sculptural form. What begins as botanical reference gradually dissolves into saturated fields of line and colour. The works reflect a practice shaped by migration, where material experimentation becomes a language for negotiating movement and identity.
—Aisha Zaman
