Wadi Hanifah as seen from a terrace at the Diriyah Biennale Foundation, JAX District, 2024

Amid the protests, boycotts and cancellations that have roiled major exhibitions and festivals in Europe in recent months, it is the contemporary art biennale, in particular, that is facing its moment of reckoning, in its continent of origin. While prognostications of the format’s demise have been around for at least a decade, the initial cynicism directed towards its curatorial excesses and performative politics have turned into a dreaded sense of waiting out the slow collapse of the entire edifice under the weight of its contradictions. Perhaps it’s long overdue that the biennale, the emblem of art’s global turn, making its case in a time of endless war—both military and economic—would be reduced to its current plight: less an agent for social justice than an appropriation of the oppressed bodies for which justice is sought for visual consumption; more a symptom than a critique of global capitalism and its radicalized division of labor. Proponents of the biennale might read in this condition a betrayal of the modernist internationalism that gave the format its mature twentieth-century form; in truth, this decline is better understood against the ongoing lapse of an older global-imperial order and the emergence of a new international order which, despite being thoroughly shaped by the legacies of empire, is no longer centered upon the former colonial powers.

Many have identified, quite accurately I think, documenta 15 as a key inflexion point within this trajectory, to which the uncertain future of its next edition, following the resignation of its entire Finding Committee, attests. Even without considering the already extensively debated antisemitism controversy that was in itself revelatory of the German establishment’s moral blinkers, the sprawling and organisationally decentralised edition of the quinquennial conceived by
the Indonesian collective ruangrupa tested European sensibilities not merely through its majority selection of Global South artists but also through its focus on highly situated collective practices and their relocation to a Global North exhibitionary context. Looking back, this bold challenge to German hospitality, in more ways than one, did not so much propose new forms of exhibition-making as it exposed the limits of the exhibitionary in representing the kinds of socially-embedded artmaking prevalent in the Global South. While much more ink has been spilled over how the establishment’s moral crusade following the discovery of antisemitic imagery at documenta 15 revealed the limits of artistic freedom in Germany, it is more accurately the show’s decidedly anti-exhibitionary character that truly exploded what was once Europe’s most respected platform for showing what a large-scale contemporary art exhibition can do.

Yet, the curious irony to be observed in this confrontation of artistic geographies is that today it is in fact in countries from the Global South, especially in Asia and the Middle East, where the biennale in its archetypal form as a “large-scale international exhibition” is seeing renewed interest. Indeed, with the exception of biennales like the Biennale Jogja well-known for its site-specific projects that privilege communal gathering over the individual encounter with the art object, biennales in this part of the world have mostly proven to be much less interested in interrogating or subverting the exhibitionary than they are in fully exploiting the affordances of exhibition-making in its most expansive, global form, not least as a means of making claims on behalf of a community, region or even the entire Global South. At its most idealistic, such efforts demonstrate the stakes of representation in contexts in which mere visibility still carries political force. But given that such biennales are frequently the products of astute political calculation, here the exhibition itself also becomes a space to imagine and rehearse what a Global South or South-South politics backed by actual state power might look like.

Vikram Divecha, Wall Extract (Riyadh), 2024

Photo by Marco Cappellettii

“After Rain,” Installation view of Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024

Just considering the major state-funded biennales that opened in the Global South in the months following ruangrupa’s intervention at Kassel, a common sensibility across the different contexts is the extent to which the exhibitionary—not just the exhibited artworks—is foregrounded as an experience in and of itself. This approach was pursued on a breathtaking scale at the 2023 edition of the Sharjah Biennial, which unfolded across five cities in the Emirate and featured over 300 artworks, including numerous new commissions, several warehouse-sized installations, and the equivalent of a mini-survey dedicated to a number of artists. In a climate where most large-scale exhibitions are scaling down due to austerity or ecological reasons, the enormity of the endeavor was justified as a celebration of the biennale entering its 30th year. However, it was not just the sheer magnitude that constituted the exhibitionary experience but also the ambition to literally claim space for virtually every artistic position—postcolonial, feminist, queer, Indigenous, diasporic, and ecological—in circulation.

Similar tendencies could be observed in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which opened months earlier, albeit on a much more modest scale and through a more thoughtfully choreographed selection of artists that largely eschewed spectacle for quieter—but no less sensuous—modes of storytelling drawn from the lifeworlds of agrarian, Indigenous, and working-class communities. The 2023 edition of the Shanghai Biennale—in which I was a participant—likewise featured a focus on narrative, but further applied the thematic framework of “Cosmos Cinema” to give the exhibition its distinctive spatial design: after entering the first cavernous and darkened exhibition hall, the audience follows a strictly linear route that ends with a projection featuring rolling credits above the biennale’s exit. Ending the year was the third edition of the itinerant Thailand Biennale, which took place in the northern border province of Chiang Rai. Despite the nebulous theme (“Open World”) and highly dispersed locations, I found the biennale an unexpectedly coherent exhibitionary experience, owing in large part to the inspired use of existing public spaces that allowed the city to emerge as a character in itself—which, it must be said, was what constituted the initial charm of the biennale format in the region before it was absorbed into purpose-built museum settings.

Maria Thereza Alves, Curing Dismembered Knowledges (detail), 2023

Garden (Earth, flora, coir logs), 900 × 500 cm

“Open World,” Installation view of Thailand Biennale 2023

Courtesy the artist and Thailand Biennale

“Cosmos Cinema”, Installation view of Shanghai Biennale 2023

Courtesy the artist and Power Station of Art

It is against this crowded landscape that the second edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale opened earlier this year in Saudi Arabia. As the first edition of the biennale not to be overshadowed by the global pandemic, the exhibition marked the first time that many international observers, myself included, got to see for ourselves the ongoing transformation of the country ever since sweeping reforms were launched about a decade ago as part of the Crown Prince’s Vision 2030 master plan. While it is true that the initiation of the reforms was largely driven by the economic imperative to steer the country away from its long-standing dependence on the oil trade, it’s also undeniable that the resulting changes in the cultural sphere have led to an unprecedented proliferation of public spaces through the museums, art centers, festivals, and large-scale exhibitions that have sprung up in recent years, many of which are helmed by women. Reverberations have also been felt across the region as arts practitioners flocked to the Kingdom not just in pursuit of cultural funding but, more importantly, the opportunity to have a hand in shaping its nascent cultural landscape.

Such realities on the ground challenge the vision of Global South collectivity often promulgated by exhibition-makers in the North that tend to seek, in much less institutionalized forms of artmaking in the South, not only an antidote to their own “individualism” but also a mode of resistance against state power, which is almost always assumed to take an authoritarian form. Defying this image of a fully formed and impenetrable entity that is “the state,” what the case of Diriyah shows instead is that the kinds of publics which activate and are activated by the organization of a biennale in the Global South more often demand leveraging a constellation of both state and non-state actors with non-oppositional but not necessarily always complementary agendas. The selection of the Beijing-based Philip Tinari, who came with decades of experience navigating the Chinese system, to direct the first edition of the biennale was in itself demonstrative of this requirement.

Armin Linke & Ahmed Mater, Saudi Futurism, 2024

Photo by Marco Cappellettii

“After Rain,” Installation view of Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024

Samia Zaru, Life is a Woven Carpet, 1995/2001

Photo by Marco Cappelletti

“After Rain,” Installation view of Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024

It was thus hardly surprising that the resulting exhibition, which borrowed an abbreviated version of a Reform-era slogan used by the Communist Party of China for its title “Feeling the Stones,” was lauded for creating an opening to take a more critical look at the rapid developments in the kingdom today through the historical proxy that is 1980s China. While the title of the present edition directed by the Singapore-based Ute Meta Bauer, “After Rain,” strikes a less overtly political note, what underlies the exhibition’s overarching ecological concerns is clearly a metaphor about the state policy (“a moment of revitalization and renewal”) for the kingdom’s post-opening-up moment. That the arts play a pivotal role in this shift is reflected in the location of the biennale within the JAX district in Diriyah, a historic town on the outskirts of Riyadh that is now undergoing a major regeneration as part of a multibillion-dollar push for cultural tourism.

Across the six refurbished industrial-warehouse spaces and surrounding courtyards and terraces where the exhibition unfolds, it is in the second exhibition hall where, under the heading “Environments and Ecologies,” the curatorial ambition is most confidently set out: a show that’s historically situated but does not shy away from universalist claims, geographically expansive but attentive to its immediate locality. With Wadi Hanifah, a seasonal riverbed that runs across Diriyah, visible through the venue’s large windows, this section is dominated by works that seek to address and sometimes directly remedy the ecological devastation wreaked by centuries of imperial extraction, though it is Armin Linke and Ahmed Mater’s collaborative take on “Saudi Futurism” (also the work’s title) that greets us upon entrance.

While appearing on paper as another variation on the now exhausted theme of Gulf Futurism, the newly commissioned photographic and archival installation is in fact a pictorial historicization of the future frenzy that has taken the kingdom over. Captured during their travels across the kingdom within the past year, Linke and Mater’s photographs document traces of the past—most notably, a mahogany office desk with an inscription from Harry Truman from the 1950s—that can still be seen within a landscape overrun by the city-scale development projects officially known as “giga-projects.” Meanwhile, archival contributions from Mater’s personal collection provide the granular details: for instance, a published study by Japanese metabolist architect Kenzo Tange and URTEC commissioned by a state ministry in 1976 shows that the kingdom’s present rush to build its way into the future has a historical precedent. Yet, this archi-archeological project also reveals its own limits. While it was touted that the artists had been looking into the archives of state-owned oil giant Aramco, it turns out that whatever access they were given did not extend to the archives’ actual contents. As the photographs showing shelves of closed binders and sealed cases suggest, the history of the former American imperial outpost remains protected territory.

The question of the Global South’s colonial inheritance is more directly broached in the section’s standout installation Tuban (2019) by Ade Darmawan, incidentally also ruangrupa’s co-founder. Designed as a distillation laboratory, the work confronts the brutal history of natural resource extraction in Indonesia by performing a kind of counter-extraction of that history. Using water from the Javanese sea to distill herbs and spices sought after by the Dutch during their colonial conquest of the archipelago, the ostensibly clinical setup produces a variety of scents while allowing drops from the tubes to fall onto the open pages of books about Suharto’s economic policies that reopened the country to be pillaged by extractive capitalism. The iconoclasm that results from wetting the images of the Indonesian dictator appearing on those pages stands in contrast to the almost life-size portraits in Christine Fenzl’s Women of Riyadh (2023) on the adjacent wall. Commissioned for the biennale, the images, which show local women of different backgrounds posing for the Berlin-based photographer during her two-week visit, provide a valuable snapshot of the kingdom following the historic expansion of women’s rights. Yet, there is also a sense here of the protagonists being mere witnesses to this transition and not its drivers.

Ade Darmawan, Tuban, 2019 (front)

Christine Fenzl, Women of Riyadh, 2023 (background)

Photo by Alessandro Brasile

“After Rain,” Installation view of Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024

Nabila Al Bassam’s multiple artworks

Photo by Marco Cappellettii

“After Rain,” Installation view of Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024

Indeed, with the incessant appearances of the Crown Prince’s Vision 2030 branding across the capital, it’s easy to accept the common (and not inaccurate) wisdom that the reforms have been largely directed by the monarchy. However, what this narrative sweeps aside are the decades of civil disobedience performed in the kingdom by women and men alike, which despite never amounting to any kind of large-scale public demonstration, were indispensable in pushing the country towards its present moment. One could thus read in the exhibition’s third section, “Modern Legacies and Geopoetics,” featuring an older generation of the region’s preeminent artists, a subtle corrective to this tendency, even though here, like the rest of the show, Saudi politics is not explicitly referenced. Yet, by simply foregrounding the work of local artists like Nabila Al Bassam, Abdulrahman Al-Soliman, and Safeya Binzagar, who sustained their practices under the much more challenging conditions of their time, and putting them in dialogue with fellow pioneers of the MENASA region such as Rasheed Araeen, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Lala Rukh, and Hassan Sharif, the selection here provides the much-needed historical perspective and expanded regional frame to understand the country’s present artistic boom.

The show stumbles whenever it abandons this materialist approach for a more reductive material one, as seen in the choice of two artworks by separate artists engaging with petrichor, the smell of soil after a downpour, by literally reproducing the olfactory sensation. The concentration of Global South artists in the penultimate section focusing on “material and spiritual intelligence” also produces a telling division between the Global North artists traversing the globe to do “site-specific” projects with locals and their southern counterparts who apparently just have to stay where they are and show us what their respective cultures have to offer. While I’m pessimistic about the prospects of exhibition-making serving as the basis for transnational solidarity today, I sense a missed opportunity here for a deeper South-North and South-South dialogue that could trouble some of these identity markers and avert the reduction of the artwork into a visual shorthand for the artist’s biography. Yet, one could also argue that these are precisely the limits of the exhibitionary model that many biennales in the Global South have embraced wholeheartedly from the outset. In the context of a country in a hurry to launch the next giga-project, the more pertinent question is whether the forms of criticality produced by the exhibition here could genuinely inspire alternative ecosystems of working and living with each other, or if they would simply become a passing view within the fast-changing scenery.

At Diriyah, we were treated to a tour of the mudbrick palace remnants at At-Turaif, the original seat of the Saudi royal family. There, we gathered at a large sitting room known as a majilis—also the word used to refer to a council or legislature across the Arab world. The Arabic word is also the root word for the Indonesian majelis that was used by documenta 15 to describe the collective assembly of all participating artists as well as their division into separate “mini-majelis” based on time zones, within which lengthy and often onerous Zoom gatherings took place regularly to discuss the distribution of their allotted resources. Among all of ruangrupa’s curatorial gestures, this decidedly non-exhibitionary intervention was its most demanding for the artists, as well as the one through which the curators essentially performed the state.

Now, thinking between Kassel and Diriyah, I wonder if there will come a day when the Global South biennale becomes not merely an exhibition mounted by the state as a discreet expression of power but a site for modeling alternative forms of statebuilding altogether. Instead of a Global South collectivity defined in opposition to state power, perhaps it’s time for a reimagination of the state truly adequate to the task of dismantling the imperialist structures that have persisted through the age of nation-states and the Global South’s ongoing exhibitionary turn.

Translated by Xi’an Chen

Ho Rui An is an artist and writer working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory.