Art & Culture

From Hockney to Halaby, Arduna Finds Common Ground in AlUla

BYKhaoula Ghanem

February 10, 2026

Land is never neutral. It is territory and memory, inheritance and extraction, sanctuary and site of contestation. Arduna (which translates to “Our Land”), is the inaugural exhibition at AlUla’s pre-opening contemporary art museum, co-curated with Paris’s Centre Pompidou, exploring how modern and contemporary artists represent nature. Yet beneath its thematic chapters—gardens, forests, desert, stars, Anthropocene, borderlines—lies a more charged question: who gets to say “our,” and under what institutional conditions?

Staged as part of the 2026 AlUla Arts Festival and positioned as a foundational gesture toward the museum’s opening, Arduna, curated by Candida Pestana, Chief Curator and Head of the AlUla Contemporary Art Museum, brings together more than 80 works from the Centre Pompidou’s collection and the Royal Commission for AlUla’s (RCU) growing holdings, alongside new commissions by artists such as Ayman Zedani, Dana Awartani, Tarek Atoui, and Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil. The exhibition is a display of masterpieces—Kandinsky, Picasso, Hockney, Brancusi—within a Saudi desert oasis undergoing rapid cultural transformation. It is also, crucially, an articulation of what kind of institution the Contemporary Art Museum intends to become.

The first chapter, “Echoes of Arcadia,” begins in the garden, a space historically tied to utopian longing. The garden, in European art history, has often served as an image of lost harmony, from Renaissance pastoral scenes to modernist abstractions of organic growth. Paul Klee’s vegetal geometries and Jean Arp’s biomorphic sculptures align with a modernist desire to find universal structures in nature, while Joan Mitchell’s gestural landscapes evoke memory as much as terrain.

David Hockney. The Arrival of Spring in Woodgate, East Yorkshire in 2011. Arduna, 2026. Centre Pompidou, Mnam-Cci, Paris

But the garden is not a neutral sanctuary. It is an enclosed space, cultivated and controlled. In the colonial imagination, gardens traveled with empire: botanical collections mapped power, categorizing and extracting flora from colonized territories. In this sense, to begin with Arcadia is to begin with a fantasy that modernism both inherited and destabilized. The inclusion of Yto Barrada’s work, which addresses greenhouses and systems of cultivation within Moroccan urban life, subtly disrupts the idyll. The greenhouse is both protection and containment, an emblem of ecological precarity in the age of climate change.

Within AlUla—a site framed as an oasis along the ancient Incense Road—the garden becomes a metaphor for the region itself. It’s a refuge amid the desert and the exhibition’s narrative leans into this image. Yet the oasis is also a managed environment, sustained through labor, irrigation, and governance. If the garden is paradise, it is also infrastructure.

The chapter “At the Forest’s Edge” moves into the wooded sublime. From David Hockney’s monumental The Arrival of Spring to Giuseppe Penone’s carved trees, the forest appears as both enchantment and threshold. Historically, forests in European art have oscillated between romantic refuge and gothic menace. They are sites where reason dissolves, where the self confronts alterity.

The forest, however, is a largely imported image in the context of AlUla’s desert landscape. Its inclusion signals the exhibition’s global scope but also its reliance on a canon rooted in European modernism. Eva Jospin’s intricate cardboard forest, for example, speaks to craft and illusion, but it also echoes a lineage of Western landscape art that positioned nature as spectacle.

Giuseppe Penone, Nel legno (In the Wood), 2009_ Il Verde del Bosco con Ramo (Forest Green with Branch), 1987. Arduna, 2026. Centre Pompidou

Yet the forest chapter does not remain purely Eurocentric. Ibrahim El-Salahi’s palm drawings shift the axis toward Sudanese modernism, where the tree is not just symbol but cosmology—an axis between spiritual and earthly realms. In juxtaposing Hockney and El-Salahi, the exhibition gestures toward multiple genealogies of landscape.

The desert chapter, “Sand and Stone,” is perhaps the exhibition’s most conceptually resonant. In Western art history, deserts have often symbolized emptiness, abstraction, or spiritual purification. But for artists across the Arab world and beyond, the desert is archive that’s alive with inscriptions, trade routes, and ecological systems.

Jean Dubuffet’s granular surfaces collapse micro and macro scales, while Viswanadhan’s use of sand as medium literalizes material connection to place. Manal AlDowayan’s Ephemeral Witness, a silk desert rose inscribed with women’s voices, brings fragility and gendered memory into the landscape; and Ayman Zedani’s infrared photographs reveal invisible energies within local flora, merging scientific imaging with speculative archaeology.

Manal AlDowayan. Ephemeral Witness. 2020. Arduna 2026

Here, the desert is not backdrop but epistemology. It challenges the Western art historical tendency to treat landscape as scene rather than subject. In AlUla—home to Nabataean tombs and millennia-old inscriptions—the desert insists on time depth. It complicates modernism’s break with tradition by embedding contemporary art within ancient terrain.

And yet, the desert is also the site of Vision 2030’s development ambitions. As cultural infrastructure rises alongside archaeological preservation, the land becomes both heritage and real estate. In this context, art about sand and stone risks aestheticizing a landscape undergoing transformation. The exhibition acknowledges climate change and urbanization in later chapters, but the desert remains suspended between critique and celebration.

“The Drift of Stars” returns to modernist abstraction. Kandinsky’s circles, Pevsner’s geometric cosmologies, and Fontana’s slashed canvases translate celestial space into formal experiment. Modernism frequently invoked the cosmos to escape earthly politics, positing abstraction as universal language.

In AlUla, the sky carries different connotations. The desert night is vast, historically navigational, tied to oral traditions and nomadic movement. Rachid Koraïchi’s embroidered constellations link ancestors to stars, re-rooting cosmic abstraction in North African spiritual lineage. Meanwhile, Mohssin Harraki’s video installation translates stellar motion into contemporary media.

Renaud Auguste-Dormeil, 2024. The Leap into the Void_ Sky of October 16, 1973. Arduna, 2026. Centre Pompidou, MNAM-Cci, Paris

Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil’s commission deepens this temporal meditation. By reconstructing historical night skies above sites of trauma, he collapses human catastrophe into cosmic continuity. His work highlights a key tension within Arduna: the scale of land versus the scale of time. The universe endures; civilizations rise and fall.

“Beyond Nature” invokes Bruno Latour’s declaration that the Anthropocene marks the end of a stable, separate nature. Here, artists confront extraction, pollution, and urban expansion. Hassan Sharif’s accumulations of cardboard critique consumer excess; Nadia Kaabi-Linke traces histories of resource exploitation; and Tarek Al-Ghoussein documents artificial island-making.

This chapter is perhaps the exhibition’s most overtly political. Yet it also raises a question: can an exhibition sponsored by state-led development fully interrogate the environmental consequences of that development?

The presence of Richard Long—a land artist known for minimal interventions—introduces a Western lineage of environmental art that often romanticized untouched nature. In contrast, artists from the MENA region foreground entanglement: land marked by trade, conflict, and displacement.

The final chapter, “Borderline,” addresses territory and belonging directly. Kemang Wa Lehulere’s installations evoke forced expulsion in South Africa; Kader Attia meditates on repair; Sliman Mansour paints uncertain landscapes of Palestinian identity. Here, “our land” fractures, becoming contested, divided, and haunted by exile.

Dana Awartani’s commission, developed with displaced stone masons, reframes heritage as living craft rather than static ruin. By collaborating with artisans affected by conflict, she foregrounds continuity amid displacement. Ayman Zedani’s speculative archaeology imagines ancient scripts as portals, blending science fiction with regional history. Both works resist nostalgia, treating the past as active material.

Dana Awartani. When the Dust of Conflict Settles. 2023. Arduna 2026

Tavares Strachan’s contribution complicates the notion of territory further. His engagement with erased histories and global trade routes—cotton fields, palaces, temples—connects the Middle East to the Caribbean and the American South. Land here is not bounded but networked.

Arduna is explicitly framed as a preview of AlUla’s future contemporary art museum. By partnering with the Centre Pompidou, the RCU aligns itself with one of Europe’s most influential modern art institutions, reflecting a broader geopolitical agreement between France and Saudi Arabia, and positioning culture as diplomatic bridge.

The Centre Pompidou’s collection anchors the show, lending canonical weight. Yet the exhibition also seeks to center regional voices, particularly through new commissions. The balance between imported masterpieces and local production is telling, situating AlUla within global art history while cultivating a distinct regional narrative.

Main image: The Holy Wadi, Ayman Zedani, Arduna, 2025

From Hockney to Halaby, Arduna Finds Common Ground in AlUla

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From Hockney to Halaby, Arduna Finds Common Ground in AlUla

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