The Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale has unveiled its theme and preliminary artist list for its third edition, set to open on January 30, 2026. Titled “In Interludes and Transitions,” the Biennale will take place in the JAX District in Diriyah, a historic town located northwest of Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.

Ahead of the announcement, ArtAsiaPacific spoke with artistic directors Nora Razaian and Sabih Ahmed to discuss their vision, curatorial methodologies, and conceptual framework.

The idea of an “interlude” suggests a pause, a suspension of narrative, while “transition” implies motion and change. How do you reconcile these seemingly opposing states when framing a biennale? Do we inhabit pauses differently from how we inhabit transitions?

Nora Razaian (NR) & Sabih Ahmed (SA): The Arabic title of the Biennale, fil hil wal terhal, originates from a colloquial term among nomadic communities in the Arabian Peninsula, whose lives unfolded through cyclical patterns of encampments and journeys. The English title, “In Interludes and Transitions,” departs from a literal translation and instead draws from musical and performative language. The Biennale resists framing pause and motion as opposites, approaching them as cycles of itinerancy. We conceive this edition as a consideration of the world through a multitude of processions—of communities, stories, dreams, various species, storms, and commodities—each moving at different velocities. Some are interrupted, some exiled, others pause, creating new solidarities.

When you think about “transition,” do you see it primarily as a collective process or as something more intimate for each viewer?

NR & SA: Transition for us evokes the constant state of becoming, of shifting, and of moving. It can also be a change within a rhythm of a song, a turning point in a story, or a shift from human to animal or spirit form in a folktale. We are all in continuous states of flux, sometimes brought about by choice, and at others by force, experienced at intimate and planetary scales at once. 

Returning to the Arabic and English titles, our emphasis lies in the shared position of being within these movements and transformations, both collectively and individually. It is impossible to view what unfolds in society and on the planet from an objective distance; we are deeply embedded and implicated in these shifts. The artworks in the Biennale question and reimagine what constitutes the “we” in this convulsive moment in history. All of us on the curatorial team see contemporary art as vital in envisioning new affinities and embracing the evolving meanings of difference. The image of processions and journeys reminds us that the world’s currents do not merely surround us, they move through us, and we, in turn, are part of those currents.

As Donna Haraway says, “it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts… It matters what worlds make worlds, what worlds make stories.” What are the tales, poems, sounds and songs that we move with and through worlds in transition?

Sabih, in “Notations on Time” (2023) and your engagements with curatorial peers, collective archival practices have played critical roles in your past work. How do these methodological approaches resonate with the Biennial's thematic focus?

SA: Over the past several years, I have had the privilege of working closely with artists, curators, writers, and students to develop research and curatorial projects. Broadly, my focus has been on exploring a counter-pedagogy for the contemporary through the frameworks of what Asia Art Archive (AAA) termed “complex geographies” and feminist values. At AAA, my colleagues and I pursued these ideas through archival projects, exhibitions, publications, and educational programmes. This inquiry continued at the Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai, where the question of what constitutes “South Asia” became central—not as a fixed geography defined by borders on maps, but as a historically shifting, relational entity. What “South Asia” means changes drastically across Johannesburg, London, Singapore, Lahore and Delhi. This is even more acutely refracted in the Arab world’s naming—Middle East, West Asia, MENA, MENASA, the Gulf, the Arabian Peninsula—each shaped by distinct political and economic forces, enfolding different countries with every definition. Rarely do you find such a dynamic set of contours to describe a region, and rarely do you see such a density of vectors passing through vastly spread-out geographies because of the supply chains and diasporic cycles.

These reflections had really started taking shape for me at AAA and during my time as a curatorial collegiate member of the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016), curated by Raqs Media Collective. Their approach privileged questions over themes, itineraries of practice over artist lists, and cultural milieus over national representation. These ideas resurfaced in “Notations on Time,” an exhibition I co-curated with Sandhini Poddar at Ishara, which proposed an annotative approach to history—one that engages with multilingual and multitemporal ways of being. My ongoing dialogues continue to be shaped by collaborations with peers and institutions across Asia, and the Jameel Arts Centre has been an important ally and interlocutor in these conversations across West Asia.

Nora, how has your work at Art Jameel, with its emphasis on cultural and social sustainability, guided the Biennale’s focus on resilience as an artistic and social practice?

NR: Through working with Art Jameel to set up and grow two “homegrown” cultural centers, both located in historic port cities, and each deeply embedded in their local context—my interests have revolved around thinking through how the global has always been inflected through the local, and tracing the trajectories of passage that have shaped and continue to shape this part of the world—trade routes, supply lines, logistics, pilgrimage, and tourism. At the same time Art Jameel is committed to supporting and amplifying the role of arts and culture in relation to the climate crisis, and to insisting on its vitality in the face of violent erasure, and this too has been a guiding light for me in putting together the biennale in close collaboration with Sabih and the curatorial team. The persistence of forms, stories, myths and songs was something I felt needed to be foregrounded in these difficult and painful times.

Both of you have worked in contexts that navigate postcolonial legacies and contemporary art’s global circuits. How does this critical stance shape your vision for the Biennale’s “transitions” as processes of decolonization or rewriting histories?

NR & SA: In putting together the Biennale, we have been aware that it is taking place in the wake of the first quarter of the 21st century. It cannot be denied that we are witnessing a social and cultural paradigm shift where the categories and classification systems of knowledge, institutions and society that were inherited from both colonial and post-colonial legacies do not seem compatible with lived realities. Divisions between nature and culture; between the biological, environmental and technological; between the past and the present; between visual, aural and other senses; all appear deeply entangled. Our present day understanding of deep-time; of the millions of other life forms (the microbiome) that live inside and constitute who/what we are; of the connection between social and environmental justice; of new forms of social gathering that are at once virtual and physical, all point to new discourses, ethics, vocabularies and ways of being in the world that we may not yet have a name for, but we are all stakeholders in defining them. Art in all its forms has an enormous role to play in this and we hope this Biennale shares how artists and thinkers do this by calling on diverse knowledge systems while testing new ones.

The Biennale is therefore interested in calling forth a cacophony of histories, of invoking multiplicities and connections across geographies and through time, an upheaval of sediments. The practices that we are foregrounding are seeking to be written for, and from within, rather than against. The Biennale is being conceived as a choreography of diverse materials and sonic practices that come together in the form of an exhibition, music and poetry recitals, a symposium of lecture performances, and outdoor and indoor arenas. Here histories and historical figures will be recalled but always in relation to the present. 

In curating a global platform like the Diriyah Biennale, how do you avoid the risk of staging cultural encounters as mere spectacle, rather than creating genuine spaces for transformation?

NR & SA: What is wonderful about the Diriyah Biennale is that the majority of visitors are local and regional. It is a very well attended biennale that draws in a curious and engaged audience. For us, as well as for the curatorial team, it is important that visitors would somehow recognize themselves in the Biennale, that they would feel a connection to what they are experiencing. In that respect, our aim is not to create a biennale that presents Diriyah to the world, but rather one that reflects how the world appears from the vantage point of Diriyah. 

We have also commissioned a number of artworks, both in the outdoor spaces and within the exhibition spaces which act as “Arenas.” These are spaces of rest, conviviality, and sustenance, and where we want audiences to spend time with the work and with each other.

Both our practices are not vested in producing grand, isolated gestures. We wanted to create a biennale where the works are in conversation with each other, and where you read works and geographies in relation. The envisioned Biennale is intended to be experienced in layered continuity as you move through the connected indoor and outdoor exhibition spaces.

The initial list of participating artists and collectives is as follows:

Pio Abad
Rand Abdul Jabbar
Yussef Agbo-Ola (Olaniyi Studio)
Ahaad Alamoudi
Afra Al Dhaheri
Mohammed Alhamdan (7amdan)
Ruba Al-Sweel
Taysir Batniji
Raven Chacon
Rohini Devasher
Merve Ertufan
Ivana Franke
Rahima Gambo
Petrit Halilaj
Aziz Hazara
Alana Hunt
Yazan Khalili
George Mahashe
Théo Mercier
Nour Mobarak
Nancy Mounir
Hussein Nassereddine
Daniel Otero Torres
Thảo Nguyên Phan
Gala Porras-Kim
Sarker Protick
Raqs Media Collective
Oscar Santillán
Trương Công Tùng
Wolff Architects
Agustina Woodgate
Yu Ji