“There are currents that run through the works and the environmental one is at the fore,” said Wakefield.ĭana Awartani, ‘Where the Dwellers Lay,’ Desert X AlUla, 2022. Through their work artists tackled questions of human progress, migration, ancient history, and importantly, climate change. “My version of Desert X whether it is here, or California, is that it is not thematic. “I think the desert is interesting to people because it is a heterotopic space, not because it can be subsumed under a single theme,” Wakefield told Arab News.
They also connote the incomprehensible beauty and abundance of nature in its most bereft state-the desert – and humans’ obsessive desire to capture and control it.”Ĭlaudia Comte, ‘Dark Suns, Bright Waves,’ Desert X AlUla, 2022. “The oasis pertains to ideas of finding prosperity or heaven, while the mirage is a universal symbol of the mysteries of imagination and reality. “The desert concepts of mirage and oasis have long been tied to ideas of survival, perseverance, desire and wealth,” said Fadda in a statement. The artists, who come from around the world, including the US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Ghana, created work without any guidelines from the organizers but which was cemented in ideas of literature, nature, history and culture intrinsic to the desert surroundings in which they were placed. It took place in a larger location, the Al-Mutadil valley, under the theme “Sarab,” which means mirage in Arabic.
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This year’s event, which is free and open to all, was staged under the curatorial vision of Reema Fadda, Raneem Farsi, and Founding Desert X artistic director Neville Wakefield. The event, which first took place in Coachella Valley in California in 2017, is about creating art in dialogue with the land that also prompts cross-cultural dialogue and the examination of pertinent topical issues. (Supplied)ĭenevan’s work is one of 15 now on show at Desert X AlUla, the site-specific contemporary exhibition of monumental art in the desert, launched in AlUla in early 2020. This was exactly Denevan’s aim: To mold, like his many sandcastles, the visitor’s experience in the desert.Īyman Zedani, ‘The Valley of the Desert Keepers,’ Desert X AlUla, 2022. The experience is breathtaking and surreal, causing one to ask if they are really on planet Earth or perhaps rather in some faraway alternate reality. As one approaches and enters the work, the sand mounds go from larger to smaller in size.
The work was made with the help of local volunteers from AlUla. Titled “Angle of Repose,” it is one of the first and largest works visitors will see when they attend Desert X AlUla’s second edition, which opened on Feb. The circle of sand mounds is by US artist Jim Denevan. DUBAI: They look like dozens of sandcastles, some bigger than the others, the remains of hours of imaginative play, except for the fact that the 364 concentric sand mound circles are stationed within the breathtaking rock formations of AlUla, the ancient region in Saudi Arabia that has been drawing people and civilizations for over 200,000 years.
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