Art & Culture

Desert X AlUla 2026: Eleven Installations, One Living Landscape

BYKhaoula Ghanem

February 4, 2026

In 2017, in California’s Coachella Valley, something unusual began to take shape. Far from the white walls of museums and the temperature-controlled hush of art fairs, a group of artists installed monumental works directly into the desert. Visitors drove from sculpture to sculpture under a relentless sun, navigating sand, scrub, and vast empty stretches that refused to behave like a conventional exhibition map. That first edition of Desert X did not attempt to tame the landscape. It asked artists to respond to it.

Conceived by The Desert Biennial, Desert X was built on a simple but demanding premise: contemporary art should be placed in direct conversation with desert environments and the communities that inhabit them. The Coachella Valley, long mythologized in American cultural memory, became a testing ground for site-responsive works that confronted ecology, land politics, Indigenous histories, and the spiritual pull of arid terrain. Since its inception, the exhibition has welcomed more than two million visitors and presented over 100 artists across its editions. It proved that a desert is not an empty backdrop, it is an active participant.

Three years later, that experiment crossed continents.

In 2020, Desert X expanded beyond the United States and partnered with Arts AlUla to establish Desert X AlUla in northwest Saudi Arabia. The collaboration was not a franchise exercise but a dialogue between two desert regions separated by geography but linked by shared conditions: heat, horizon, isolation, and a long history of human adaptation. Since then, California and AlUla have taken turns hosting the exhibition, continuing with the fourth edition in AlUla, which opened on Jan. 16 and runs to Feb. 28, 2026.

To understand why Desert X feels at home in AlUla, one has to look at the land itself.

AlUla stretches across 22,561 square kilometres of sandstone mountains, oasis valleys, and archaeological sites. It is home to Hegra, the principal southern city of the Nabataean Kingdom and Saudi Arabia’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site. Ancient Dadan once served as the capital of the Dadan and Lihyan kingdoms, and Jabal Ikmah preserves inscriptions carved in multiple languages. Trade routes passed through this region for millennia, while caravans moved goods, stories, and beliefs across its terrain.

Today, under the stewardship of Arts AlUla and the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU), the region is undergoing a cultural transformation. Festivals, residencies, design initiatives, and long-term public art programmes are positioning AlUla as a major destination for contemporary art in the landscape. Desert X AlUla operates as both exhibition and signal, announcing that the desert can host ideas at scale.

The partnership with Desert X California bridges two art ecosystems while respecting local context. Every commission for Desert X AlUla 2026 has been fabricated in Saudi Arabia, using locally sourced materials and regional artisans. Traditional rammed earth techniques sit alongside kinetic sculpture and electro-acoustic installations. The desert, however, remains the central protagonist.

For centuries, deserts have been framed as hostile or uninhabitable, described in terms of scarcity and survival. Yet deserts also contain complex ecosystems, migratory routes, and geological memory. In AlUla, rock faces hold inscriptions from ancient civilizations, palm groves rise from an oasis sustained by underground water systems, and Acacia trees endure extreme conditions and continue to grow.

Zoé Whitley and Wejdan Reda, Desert X AlUla 2026 Curators, Courtesy of the Royal Commission for AlUla

This tension between exposure and endurance sits at the heart of the 2026 theme, Space Without Measure. Curated by Wejdan Reda and Zoé Whitley, with artistic direction by Neville Wakefield and Raneem Farsi, the exhibition draws inspiration from the writings of Lebanese writer Kahlil Gibran, who described dreams as “space without measure.” Gibran’s words invite contemplation of imagination as boundless and unconfined by physical limits. In a landscape defined by vast horizons, that invitation carries weight.

The roster brings together artists whose careers carry weight across continents.

Take Agnes Denes, one of the most respected pioneers of ecological and conceptual art. Born in Hungary and based in the United States, Denes became internationally known for Wheatfield – A Confrontation in 1982, when she planted a two-acre wheat field in downtown Manhattan, directly facing Wall Street. It was an audacious gesture that questioned value, land use, and systems of power. For over five decades, Denes has used monumental acts of cultivation to reframe environmental responsibility as artistic practice.

Agnes Denes, The Living Pyramid, Desert X AlUla 2026, Courtesy of Lance Gerber

In AlUla, she presents “The Living Pyramid,” the latest iteration of a project she has realized in different parts of the world. But here, it carries a distinct resonance. The stepped structure rises from the oasis filled with hundreds of plants native and indigenous to AlUla. These are not decorative additions, they are species rooted in the ecology of the region, plants that understand the soil, the climate, the extremes. Thus, the pyramid becomes less a static monument and more a living organism embedded in its environment.

The engineering is just as deliberate as the symbolism. The structure is self-watering, drawing moisture from nearby cliffs and rock formations, channeling the natural hydrology of the site into a sustainable system. In a desert landscape where water is precious and ancient irrigation techniques once sustained entire civilizations, that gesture matters. Denes does not impose greenery onto the desert as spectacle. She builds a system that cooperates with it. The work embodies cycles: soil to root, root to blossom, blossom back to earth. It proposes optimism without naivety, resilience without denial of fragility.

If Denes looks toward regeneration, Mohammed AlSaleem asks us to look backward.

Works by Mohammed Al Saleem throughout the exhibition are on loan courtesy of Riyadh Art collection, The Royal Commission for Riyadh City

AlSaleem, one of Saudi Arabia’s foundational modernists, is represented in Desert X AlUla through five sculptural works from the 1980s. For decades, these pieces were effectively lost to public view. They sat in storage in Riyadh, gathering dust in a warehouse, largely unseen and spoken about more than experienced. This is the first time in decades that they are being exhibited. That detail changes everything.

AlSaleem was not merely producing formal abstractions. He developed a geometric language informed by desert horizons, shifting light, and celestial bodies. His forms rise upward, echoing dunes, crescents, and solar arcs. In the 1980s, when Saudi contemporary art infrastructure was still developing, his work laid early foundations for what a modern Saudi visual vocabulary could look like. Yet like many artists from his generation, his sculptures slipped from circulation, overshadowed by changing tastes and limited institutional support.

To encounter them now, installed in the open air of AlUla rather than confined to storage, feels almost corrective. The desert becomes both backdrop and reclamation as their upward thrust toward the sky mirrors the landscape’s vertical rock faces and their geometry converses with the clean lines of shadow at dusk. It is as if the works have finally returned to the terrain that inspired them.

Ibrahim El-Salahi, Haraza Tree, Desert X AlUla 2026, Courtesy of Lance Gerber

Other participating artists include Ibrahim El-Salahi, a central figure in Sudanese modernism, who contributes “Haraza Tree.” El-Salahi’s career bridges Islamic calligraphy, African visual traditions, and European modernism. His meditative drawings and paintings have shaped generations of artists across Africa and the Middle East. In AlUla, he transforms the acacia tree into a sculptural forest.

Vibha Galhotra, based in New Delhi, has built her practice around the ecological and social consequences of rapid development. Across photography, installation, and sculpture, she consistently returns to questions of extraction, pollution, and erasure. Her work often feels archaeological, as if she is sifting through the aftermath of progress. In “Future Fables,” she encases fragments of demolished buildings within a steel framework. The rubble embedded within it is not random debris, but remnants of structures that once stood and held lives. Instead of allowing these materials to vanish into landfill or dust, Galhotra suspends them in a kind of architectural reliquary.

Vibha Galhotra, Future Fables, Desert X AlUla 2026, Courtesy of Lance Gerber

Saudi artist Mohammad Alfaraj’s practice has long revolved around ecology, memory, and a kind of quiet metaphysics grounded in everyday materials. Raised in Al-Ahsa, an oasis region where palm groves and irrigation channels shape both landscape and identity, Alfaraj grew up surrounded by systems of care that were practical and poetic at once. Date palms were sources of sustenance, shade, economy, and symbolism. Water was infrastructure and miracle, and soil was labour and inheritance.

In AlUla, he carries that sensibility into “What was the Question Again?,” an installation—a grafted sculpture constructed from tree limbs sourced from around AlUla— that unfolds as a maze. The title reads almost like a philosophical joke, but the work itself is deeply earnest. For Alfaraj, the act of questioning holds more value than arriving at fixed answers. The maze becomes a spatial metaphor for that process. The conceptual seed of the piece emerged during a site visit with curator Reda. They encountered an acacia tree that appeared to be hosting another species within its own trunk. One organism sustained another. That image of grafting and co-dependency became the structural and philosophical core of the installation. In horticulture, grafting allows two plants to grow as one, sharing nutrients and survival. In Alfaraj’s work, grafting speaks to coexistence across cultures, generations, and ecosystems.

Mohammad AlFaraj, Desert X AlUla 2026, Courtesy of Lance Gerber

Beyond Alfaraj’s maze of grafted limbs and questions, the fourth edition of Desert X AlUla expands into a constellation of practices that move across geology, sound, architecture, and memory.

The collective Bahraini-Danish presents “Bloom,” a kinetic sculpture that responds directly to the desert’s shifting choreography of shadow and sunlight. Formed by Batool Alshaikh, Maitham Almubarak, and Christian Vennerstrøm Jensen, the collective works across art, architecture, and publishing, often engaging with systems of participation and spatial perception. In AlUla, “Bloom” does not stand still. It turns, catches light, casts evolving shadows onto the sand. Its movement is subtle yet continuous, mirroring the desert’s daily transformation from dawn to dusk. The work invites viewers to consider time not as linear progression but as cyclical recurrence. As the sculpture rotates, it enters into dialogue with the terrain, suggesting that even in a landscape associated with stillness, nothing is ever static.

Bahraini-Danish, Desert X AlUla 2026, Courtesy of Lance Gerber

Where “Bloom responds to light, Saudi Arabian artist Basmah Felemban’s “Murmur of Pebbles” magnifies what is usually overlooked. Known for her engagement with Islamic geometry and diagrammatic thinking, Felemban scales up the smallest geological elements into monumental forms scattered across the desert. Pebbles become presences—what once fit in the palm of a hand now occupies space at human scale. The central sandstone form is diamond-cut, templated, and hand-carved, referencing tafoni formations shaped by erosion. Around it, basalt pebble elements emerge, sculpted by hand using templates informed by the Zing diagram associated with the Jirri Tribe. Each pebble rests on star-shaped steel plates engineered to endure the desert climate, their geometry echoing celestial patterns embedded in the artist’s conceptual framework. The installation reads like a cosmography written in stone. It gestures toward the ancient rivers that once shaped AlUla, reminding us that this desert was not always arid.

Basmah Felemban, Murmur of Pebbles, Desert X AlUla 2026, Courtesy of Lance Gerber

Héctor Zamora’s “Tar HyPar” shifts the focus from sight to sound. Zamora, known for blurring boundaries between architecture and public participation, spent time studying the acoustic phenomena of the valley, including a solo camping expedition that allowed him to listen to the terrain. His resulting structure takes the form of a hyperbolic paraboloid, a mathematically precise surface that functions as both shelter and instrument.

The title combines “HyPar” with “Tar,” referencing traditional Saudi frame drums foundational to local cultural expression. The installation acts as a sound-amplifying device, projecting rhythm toward the surrounding mountains. When activated by drumming, the structure transforms the valley into a resonant chamber. Reverberations bounce against ancient rock walls, folding human gesture into geological time. The paradox, as Zamora notes, is that amplification heightens awareness of silence. Sound sharpens perception of stillness. The work becomes a sonic sanctuary, an invitation to create energy through collective rhythm while acknowledging forces far older than any performance.

Hector Zamora, Tar HyPar, Desert X AlUla 2026, Courtesy of Lance Gerber

Lebanese-born electroacoustic composer Tarek Atoui presents “The Water Song,” a land art installation inspired by the mysterious “desert kites” scattered across northern Saudi Arabia. These vast, ancient stone formations, visible from above as geometric outlines etched into earth, are still debated by archaeologists. Often interpreted as hunting traps, their exact function remains unresolved. Atoui’s proposition is poetic rather than archaeological: what if these structures were not only visual markers, but acoustic ones?

Drawing on ideas of archaeoacoustics, the study of sound in ancient environments, Atoui imagines the desert kites as instruments embedded in terrain. In AlUla’s sandstone landscape, he installs seven horn-like hollow structures, partially buried and carefully oriented in relation to wind direction, topography, and canyon walls. Each horn sits as if unearthed rather than installed, emerging from the ground like remnants of a forgotten civilization.

Tarek Atoui, The Water Song, Desert X AlUla 2026, Courtesy of Lance Gerber

Activated by air currents and subtle interactions with water, the horns produce evolving, generative sound sequences. There is no fixed composition. The desert performs, wind becomes breath, and water becomes pulse as the tones travel across the canyon walls, they return altered, stretched, refracted by rock. The result is not melody in the conventional sense, but chant-like resonance. Each activation generates a distinct sonic atmosphere, shaped by climate, humidity, and time of day. No two moments sound the same.

If Atoui and Zamora turn the desert into an instrument, Sara Abdu turns it into a voice. In “A Kingdom Where No One Dies: Contours of Resonance,” the Saudi-born Yemeni artist constructs vast rammed-earth walls shaped like mountain peaks. Abdu has long explored displacement, lineage, and the porousness of borders. Here, she uses sands from both AlUla and Yemen, physically blending geographies that political lines attempt to separate. The sculpture visualizes the sound wave of her own voice as she recites a poem about transcending borders and reconnecting with land.

Sara Abdu, A Kingdom Where No One Dies_Contours of Resonance, Desert X AlUla 2026, Courtesy of Lance Gerber

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, whose multidisciplinary work engages with diaspora, spirituality, and memory, presents “Imole Red.” Drawing on Yoruba cosmology and the intensity of AlUla’s sunsets, she introduces color and ritual into the landscape. Her career has consistently addressed displacement and ancestral lineage. Here, the desert becomes a bridge between West African spiritual traditions and Arabian terrain.

The title, Imole, comes from the Yoruba word for light. Light in her practice is never merely optical. It carries spiritual connotation, ancestral presence, illumination as knowledge. Campos-Pons speaks of working within the “color code” of the Yoruba pantheon. In AlUla, she focuses on yellow and gold, hues associated with sunset and with Oshun, the Yoruba deity of rivers, fertility, and vitality. Oshun embodies flow, sweetness, sensuality, and the sustaining power of water. Installing the work in a flood plain becomes deliberate rather than incidental. The location honors the valley’s hydrological past, when water shaped the land long before aridity defined it.

The sculpture synthesizes color, light, and energy into what the artist calls a blossoming, alchemical garden. The word alchemical is important. It suggests transformation. Rock and sand become conduits for radiance. The canyon becomes a chamber for chromatic exchange. The work responds to the desert’s palette rather than competing with it. As sunlight hits the forms, surfaces glow and shift, entering into a reciprocal relationship with the surrounding stone.

What binds these 11 installations together is not a shared aesthetic but a shared posture. Each artist approaches AlUla with attentiveness rather than imposition. They work with rammed earth, basalt, sandstone, sound, water, light, memory. They draw from local craft, ancestral knowledge, spiritual systems, and ecological realities. Whether reviving a modernist legacy, amplifying a drumbeat across canyon walls, grafting limbs into living sculpture, or cultivating hundreds of native plants in a self-sustaining pyramid, the works operate in conversation with the terrain that holds them.

Desert X AlUla 2026: Eleven Installations, One Living Landscape

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Desert X AlUla 2026: Eleven Installations, One Living Landscape

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