Cars, camels, and a procession of jubilant, drum-beating young men opened the first official night of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2026. The performance, entitled Folding the Tents and conceived by multidisciplinary creative Mohammed Al Hamdan, began with SUVs crawling along the desert highway leading to the biennale. Performers then congregated into a festive conga line, joined by members of the thronging crowds. As the night went on, the performance turned into a full-on dance celebration as Palestinian rapper Shabjdeed took the mic to a crowd hollering his lyrics back to him.
The opening event on January 30th was one of several “processions” that will take place during the Saudi art event. It summed up the biennale's theme as well as the unmistakable energy on the ground. Notions of movement, the co-curators Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed explained at the opening, are central to this Biennale, which is titled “In Interludes and Transitions.” The phrase in Arabic expresses solidarity and constancy, no matter what change might come.
“The biennale we present to you today is conceived as a passage through which several processions are shaping the world today,” said Razian at the event’s press conference. “We wanted to convey a world in flux, a world of movement and a world of transition.” The show hoped to develop this starting point in several different thematic rooms: one focused on music, another on dance, for instance. Not all of these ideas had room to breathe in this wide-ranging show, but the constancy of change shone through many of the works on view: how tectonic, boundary-pushing shifts define our contemporary experience.
The international art world’s interest in the Middle East is at an all-time high, thanks to Art Basel Qatar’s debut earlier this month. So there were extra eyes on the Saudi art event this year, which began in 2021 and is now in its third edition. Major new artist commissions were a highlight of the biennale, which brought together an impressive roster of artists based in the region, as well as Asia, Africa, and beyond.
Here are the standout artists to know from the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2026.
Théo Mercier
B. 1984, Paris. Lives and works in Paris and Marseille, France.
Saudi Arabia’s desert sand is a dark yellow, almost chestnut color, and it’s this material that French artist Théo Mercier makes full use of in his huge sculptural installation House of Eternity (2026). The artist meticulously shaped three enormous piles of the stuff into a range of surreal objects that put traditional sand castles to shame. Metal grated ramps surround his giant mounds, giving the viewer a kind of tourist experience, a perspective from every angle.
Atop one sand pile is a perfect life-size replica of a car; a disembodied ear stares out of another. Around all three are meticulously carved fossils and shells. Mercier, who also works in theater and dance, sees his work as a kind of archeology of the present. These massive sculptures, which look like they’re excavating these items from the sand, sum up our contemporary, wasteful lives with these temporary ruins that will be dismantled after the event. Taking into account the windswept deserts and the nearby mudbrick towers of Diriyah, Mercier’s work is an unmissable temporary monument to an impossible, yet evocative future.
Oscar Santillán
B. 1980, Milagro, Ecuador. Lives and works in Amsterdam and Quito, Ecuador.
Visitors who step into the small room, bathed in orange light, that houses Oscar Santillán’s two newly commissioned artworks, may hear strange voices. What appear to be knotted tree burls (they’re actually 3D-printed) are fitted with speakers and hang from metal cables that drape luxuriously throughout the space. These pendants respond to visitors’ sounds, emitting glitchy guttural noises from a machine learning system trained on the work of legendary Peruvian singer Yma Sumac. Like her music, the sounds channel bird calls, chants, and rhythmic melodies.
It’s a far cry from the “how-can-I-help-you” AI responses we’ve become used to in 2026, yet the work nods to the instinctive and urgent human needs that these technologies are answering. The sculptures’ rough-hewn aesthetic suggests something wild and unformed: a contrast with the second part of the commission, a glass block filled with water and pulverized computer parts that replicates a data server tower. Santillán’s vision is both futuristic and organic, coaxing human responses from cutting-edge technology—no wonder he’s been tapped to represent Ecuador (along with anti-colonial collective TAWNA) at the Venice Biennale 2026.
Kamala Ibrahim Ishag
B. 1937, Omdurman, Sudan. Lives and works in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
One of the clearest representations of the biennale’s focus on the procession is in Sudanese artist Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s oil painting Procession (Zaar) (2015), which depicts a ring of ghoul-like bodies. They dissolve as if in smoke, led by a central figure in a white robe. These wispy, fluid beings appear across a pale green and beige background that draws the artist’s subjects together in striated leaf shapes. Ishag is a renowned figure in Sudanese painting, uniting influences from Arab and Islamic traditions and African culture. She’s also known for founding the Crystalist Group, whose manifesto envisions the world like a crystal—transparent but constantly in flux, according to where you stand. In this work in particular, she draws on the traditional zaar healing ceremonies that take place across the Horn of Africa, where dance, incense, and singing bring groups of women together in harmony.
Several other paintings in the show further explore the union between humans and the environment. Her diamond-shaped canvas Lady Grown in a Tree (2017), for instance, is filled with pale, swooping lines that untangle like vines. A woman’s face and feet barely peek through these strokes, suggesting a body floating in a web of overwhelming plant matter.
Agustina Woodgate
B. 1981, Buenos Aires. Lives and works in Buenos Aires and Amsterdam.
The UNESCO World Heritage site of Al-Ahsa is an oasis region in Saudi Arabia with an irrigation system that’s nearly 2,000 years old. It’s this system that inspires The Source (2026), part of artist Agustina Woodgate’s ongoing series of sculptures exploring infrastructure. The outdoor piece (one of several “arenas,” as the curators named them) consists of several tiled, fully functional public water fountains, organized with steps on circular platforms.
Tucked into a small outdoor alley between two of the Biennale’s large halls, each sculpture has several metal drinking spouts, placed on the fountains’ surface like the sundials that helped farmers allocate water in Al-Ahsa. As the viewer walks around the artworks, mundane plastic tubing and tanks appear on the back side of the works, a tongue-in-cheek reminder of what it often takes to make water appear as if by magic. It’s a reminder of all the resources that we take for granted.
Petrit Halijaj
B. 1986, Kostërcc, Kosovo. Lives and works in Berlin.
Printed felt cutouts depicting a massive purple swan, a darkly scribbled tree, and a cut-up pink cloud all hang on threads, like massive set pieces, in Petrit Halilaj’s installation Very volcanic over this green feather (2021). Viewers can wander through this imagined landscape filled with scribbled bushes, where naively drawn birds fly overhead.
These images are blown-up versions of drawings that the artist made at the age of 13. They commemorate his time in Albania’s Kukës refugee camp, where he participated in an art therapy program after fleeing his war-torn home of Kosovo in the ’90s. Halilaj transforms these hopeful images via large-scale installation: a poignant exploration of his childhood visions and dreams, made amid the horror of war. It’s typical of Halilaj’s theatrical and personal multidisciplinary practice, which represented Kosovo at the nation’s first ever Venice Biennale pavilion. It’s a delicate balance between personal experience, often set against official historical narratives.
