WE DREAM OF NEW HORIZONS

Noor Riyadh 2022, Curatorial Statement

If there is anything to take away from the uncertainty we have lived through since the emergence of Covid-19, it is that we as humans are resilient – and our dreams irrepressible. The second edition of Noor Riyadh, an annual festival of light and art across the Saudi capital, is titled We Dream of New Horizons in tribute to those dreams. The horizon, where the sun rises and falls, announcing the start of each new day and the opportunities it affords, is where we might look to find art, both contending with and shaping what is and will come to be. Light from our dreams spills over into our waking lives, as now across Riyadh, artists explore, through a variety of different artistic practices, the power of light to imagine these possible futures.

It is undoubtedly a cause for celebration on home soil, but in its scope and ambition Noor Riyadh is also a notable achievement on a global scale. The festival comprises around 82 public artworks, many of them new commissions, ranging from the spectacular to the subtle and encompassing both immersive experiences and large-scale illuminated artworks visible from across the city. The artists are drawn from across the globe, bringing together a diverse group of perspectives through which to best reach new horizons – including international voices not usually present in Riyadh and also underrepresented on a global stage.

But while the festival brings together a roster of international and Saudi artists to engage with light and art, Noor Riyadh refers more directly to the native light of Riyadh, prompting engagement with the city itself. The desire for the festival to be truly city-wide and freely accessible to all of Riyadh’s citizens and visitors is palpable in its reach beyond the tourist destinations and bustling areas of commerce to public parks in the city’s lesser known and less affluent neighborhoods. To have such a large offering of public art is unprecedented in the Kingdom and is in itself a new horizon for the generation of Saudis to which many of the organizers, artists, and audience belong.

Through the regular rhythm of the day and night, the strength and warmth of the sun's light shapes the lives of people across the globe. Light is, in this way, a universal language, able to cross cultures, borders, and experiences, making it an evocative and powerful artistic medium. It is particularly well-suited to public art: even those less familiar with art will have a lifetime of experience of light and an innate understanding of its various qualities and effects. Traditions both religious and secular provide grounding to such explorations: whether the Quran’s illuminations or the importance of light in Islamic architecture, or the legacy of Light Art, whose neon lights inspire works featured in this year’s festival by Bertrand Lavier and François Morellet.

Despite the universality of light, however, as one moves through the seasons, or even the day, it becomes evident that light comes in many shades. Geographic specificity offers its own distinctions, and in Riyadh, a city on the edge of the desert where the sun is in particular abundance, the quality of its light has affected everything from the indigenous regional flora and fauna to the architectural vernacular that has developed, through to the ways in which people move about the city and landscape. In more recent history, the discovery of oil in the Kingdom brought with it the fast-paced development of cities such as Riyadh – and a new abundance of nighttime illumination. The lighting of the modern city has always had a strong functional dimension and a commercial bias – a display to be consumed rather than inhabited. Nevertheless, there is also a long history of illuminating cities for spectacle and pleasure that the works of the festival draw on, creating a new rhetoric of urban space for Riyadh in which lighting for productivity is overtaken by lighting for the imagination. It is in this city of light that Noor Riyadh offers new opportunities for artistic exploration to a dynamic mix of international and local artists.

Of the artists taking part in the city-wide festival and exhibition this year, over 40 are from Saudi Arabia. They range from established figures in the short history of Saudi art to a number of emerging – but already active – participants in the Kingdom’s burgeoning and thriving arts scene. With light as subject and medium, they are able to deftly explore questions both perennial and distinct to their generation of Saudi artists, as well as bringing tacit knowledge of the city and its culture. As for the international artists coming to the city anew, each will bring with them their own relationship to light – undoubtedly different for those residing further north and south of the Equator.

It is this multiplicity of voices that defines the second edition of Noor Riyadh. International contributors include artist and composer Noel Apitta, whose bold ambition lights up dazzling works of generative art; while Patch Theater Company has looked to nurture the imaginations of children, and with it finding something for the child within us all. David Spriggs expands our horizons through the dedicated refinement of the signature technique behind his Stratachrome series, while others exploit the potential of technology to spectacular effect. All of whom bring, from different angles, works that are variously engaging, breathtaking, and challenging to the festival.

If light is Riyadh’s medium, the city itself plays an important part as both canvas and gallery-without walls, a concept explored in Arne Quinze and Grimanesa Amorós’ large scale installations, that play with the fabric of the city, and attempt to fuse locals with visitors. Throughout the festival, the curation takes particular consideration of the diverse localities in which the artworks can be found. Away from the brighter lights and squares of the city center, a number of artists were drawn instead to Riyadh’s natural landscapes. Water’s reflective quality offers a particular opportunity for working with light, but this landscape also holds historical significance for a city whose name is derived from the words for ‘gardens’ and ‘meadows,' recalling the historical fertility of the wadis – valleys which fill with water during rainy periods – around which Riyadh was founded. Those in Riyadh today will be familiar with the newly restored wetlands of Wadi Hanifa and Wadi Namar, the former now incorporating a natural water treatment center – an award-winning project providing a crucial piece of city infrastructure. This beautiful and popular city location has unsurprisingly drawn the attention of a few of the artists, such as Gisela Colon with her installation One Thousand Galaxies of Light, while other works find a home in the smaller neighborhood parks found across the city.

Public art’s ability to regenerate urban space is a phenomenon that can be seen across the globe. Although the specific context of each situation shapes how this occurs, what is evident is that art acts as the initial drop from which wider ripples of change spread. In Riyadh, the situation is unique; rather than looking to replicate precedents found elsewhere, the actions of Noor Riyadh pose instead a braver question: what happens when the decision is taken to install site-specific works across every community, reappropriating urban space to introduce public art to a city where access to it had previously been so limited? It starts with a drop: the city-wide celebration of light and art that is Noor Riyadh, but from this drop, how will the ripples spread? In the coming years this will become evident. It may bring about the investment to provide new buildings and facilities to a neighborhood, or, perhaps of particular relevance given the proportion of the population who are under 40, it will ignite the imaginations of future generations of Saudi artists. While the festival itself temporarily renders the city an open-air museum, there will also be a number of participatory and educational workshops offered by the artists involved.

The power of light to render something visible, or to show something ‘in a new light’ makes it a regenerative tool for the city and its inhabitants in the hands of artists. In Ayman Yossri Daydban’s work, an illuminated phrase, “God Willing, All Will Be Resolved”, atop an abandoned building acts as a caption which reframes a familiar scenescape, expressing new hope for a lost part of the city.

Many of the works within the festival are spectacular, either dazzling the senses with color, or, as in Douglas Gordon’s work, giving form to intangible concepts such as the speed of light, while others celebrate the humbler moments of life. In one work by Bashaer Hawsawi, a mother’s practice of preserving lemons by drying them in the sun is memorialized as a public sculpture, giving an everyday practice a visible presence in the city. Elsewhere, small-scale, design-led interventions by Aseel Alamoudi transform regular items of street furniture – a bench, a wall – through a combination of material and illumination, prompting a different interaction with the familiar landscape of the day-to-day.

The intangibility and versatility of light makes it a medium through which to express the complexity of a place, its people, and culture; a collective imaginary where a multitude of experiences coexist and layer over time. The intermingling of past, present, and possible futures, and the ways in which these do or don’t map onto one another, is brought to the fore in a number of works. In a desert location, solar powered reflective ‘cat eyes,’ normally used for lighting roads and runways, are placed instead on the desert floor in a minimalist intervention by Ahmed Mater. As the lights blink in this remarkable setting, they are evocative of dreams, bringing into question what is reality and what is fiction.

The technology of projection, meanwhile, allows for the visible layering of narratives, whether fact or fiction, in order to parse hidden truths. Machine learning-generated images are projected onto a building by Daniah Al Saleh, while elsewhere in installations by Hicham Berrada or Basmah Felemban, nature is given new prominence in the city; in Daan Roosegaarde’s work a part of the city is even virtually flooded. Other artists make use of the absorbing qualities of moving image to immerse the audience in works drawing on personal experience.

A number of the commissions use material to bend and transform light and with it our perceptions. The project by duo Nasser Almulhim and Tamara Kalo makes use of different materials to explore the convergence of the old and new throughout the city of Riyadh, cement mixed with mud reminiscent of traditional adobe walls representing the former, and a futuristic pink metallic finish symbolizing the latter. Both offer a shift in perspective as the city is seen anew: the traditional material takes on new meanings, while the mirrored form reflects the surrounding city back differently, altered by the hue and curve of its surface. Sabine Marcelis’ Light Horizon, located in Al Bujairi, plays beautifully with the natural sunlight during the day and is transformed at night when the light source within is activated, rendering the panels translucent. Its large scale allows for an immersive and larger-than-life experience, inviting passersby to meander through a “horizon" and explore its many facets.

Light, as the artists of Noor Riyadh show, provides a varied and sophisticated palette with which contemporary art can be realized thanks to its myriad associations, applications, and effects. Throughout the festival is a range of rich creative responses using old techniques and new technology to tell stories of both the past and future, from video, sculpture, and installation to spectacular fully immersive experiences such as I See You Brightest in the Dark by Muhannad Shono, the representative artist for Saudi Arabia at the 2022 Venice Art Biennale. As engaging works of public art, some are conversational, some are experiential, but all make a case for art – and the dreams it gives shape to – as something which belongs to everyone, regardless of specific experience, origin, or language.

While the idea of looking to the horizon might be overwhelming, in their various ways the artworks of Noor Riyadh might act as compass points, or constellations, by which to navigate; not just works to look at, but guiding lights for others to realize their own dreams. It is in these ways that Noor Riyadh’s second edition proceeds, with its dreams of new horizons only the starting point of something more for all who pass through.