Islamic Arts Biennale gives Saudi Arabia a cultural leg-up

Even for those who live and work in the Middle East, the Islamic Arts Biennale remains, both in concept and in existence, rather hard to grasp – perhaps because of its ingenuity and subtlety. Its location is key. As with the inaugural 2023 event, this year’s biennale (25 January 25 to 25 May 2025) was held beneath the soaring canopy of the Hajj Terminal at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah – designed by Bangladeshi-American architect Fazlur Rahman Khan of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill – opened in 1981 and arguably the greatest moment of late modernism in the region.

In 2023, a cluster of simple cuboid buildings was placed at the northern end of the open ground beneath the tent-like Teflon-coated fibreglass structures suspended from pylons. These new buildings, including five gallery spaces, were designed by the Italian architect Giò Forma to host the biennale, while scenography was by Dutch practice OMA, which has returned to the task for the much larger second edition.   

Taken in architectural terms alone, the biennale is a fascinating exploration of what temporary architecture could mean in the modern Middle East – a truly welcome act given all the institution-building and heavy construction in the diversification to tourism over the last 20 years. It shows the potential for sensitive, adaptive and economical design in the cultural sphere and, given the success of the event, the likely direction of travel in the field in several different ways.

The first aspect is the often overlooked act of valuing the existing. When OMA worked on the first biennale, there was an intention to build an additional cluster of four exhibition pavilions. While still factoring in future expansion, the practice advised the biennale team that the internal space they had was enough, and that they should cherish the flexible, open area beneath the spectacular canopy shaded from the sun, naturally ventilated, with views to aircraft arriving and departing. OMA suggested a series of low, canted walls to help structure the landscaping near the biennale buildings, and this is where the majority of contemporary art pieces were successfully situated during this year’s event. 

OMA’s scenography negotiated four different display conditions brilliantly. Whereas the work it did for the 2023 biennale used single layers of different fabrics, including felt and varied lighting conditions, this year’s expanded exhibition needed more visual continuity. The team led by Kaveh Dabiri opted for a double layer of white cotton materials throughout; a basic fabric to the rear and an elasticated translucent composite to the fore, used in different ways. ‘All of the rooms have some sort of architectural language, if you like,’ says Dabiri, ‘and are also unified through very simple implementation of the white, often translucent textile, which is then lit differently.’

In one section, AlMadar (The Orbit), 35 institutions, including Oxford’s History of Science Museum, the Vatican Apostolic Library and Cairo’s Museum of Islamic Art, presented selected objects, representing the engagement of Muslims with celestial navigation, the mapping of oceans and rivers, and mathematical calculations – a treasure trove including the oldest astrolabe in existence, ancient maps from Istanbul and tiles from the Alhambra Palace in Spain.

This was not an art fair or even a conventional biennale, but an impromptu museum, with OMA’s simple scenography providing the required solemnity and grace to carry this off in basic hangar-like buildings. Different types of artefacts or themes in bespoke, minimalist museum cases were clustered together, with individual institutions represented by double fabric columns rising from the containers of key objects. Lit from their bases on top of the case, they created the effect of a beam from above. This was perhaps the most symbolic evocation of the biennale’s theme: ‘all that is in between’ – a phrase that occurs 20 times in the Qur’an and alludes to man’s attempts to comprehend the divine through his creation.

In the AlMuqtani (Homage) section, the scenography performed a diplomatic act, negotiating between two collections in one space: the Al Thani Collection, dominated by jewellery and superlative craft objects; and the Furusiyya Art Collection, devoted to weaponry, armour and metalwork. The double-skinned white fabric was legible as a wall, stepping in plan to a narrow central point, providing recesses for glass cases to show objects before stepping out again on the other side of a central partition. The Al Thani collection was privileged by being first, yet the stepped profile walls began low and rise throughout the space so the Furusiyya section had a sense of greater grandeur. That suggested a balance in prestige but also a fair difference reflecting the scale of the respective collections.

Exhibitions could effectively be viewed in any order, given that Giò Forma’s structures are arrayed around a central fountain area. Nominally the first section was Al Bidayah (The Beginning), and contained large objects. It occupied two buildings, the material stretched to near the full 13.6m height, and presented a smooth surface as a backdrop to the monumental objects of religious devotion, particularly the dark kiswah. This is the fabric that dresses the Kaabah at the heart of Mecca, which was exhibited in its entirety outside the holy city for the first time.

This section also contained contemporary pieces including Arcangelo Sassolino’s Memory of Becoming, a perpetually rotating 8m-diameter steel disc coated with a viscous industrial oil, its surface a morass of slowly shifting forms. Here the double skin hid the steel truss that supports the motor and the disc. Culminating this section was a double artwork by British architect Asif Khan, whose current work includes the Museum of the Incense Road in AlUla, Saudi Arabia. At the biennale, OMA’s design team worked closely with Khan, incorporating his suggestion that the chamber in which the main piece stands should be in the centre of a circular space, with its floor rising inward by around 200mm.

According to Khan, who grew up in the Islamic faith, the proposal emerged from ‘something which I saw that I had never quite noticed. Although the book is the essence of the religion, the physical spaces that house the book – our homes, the mosque or the bookshelf within the mosque – have no direct relationship with the book in terms of design.’

His project culminated in a luminous Qur’an made from 604 sheets of 0.1mm-thick glass, hand-gilded with 23-carat gold leaf, a process that took about 2,000 man hours in a hastily assembled static and dust-free room in an east London warehouse.

The Qur’an was originally proposed by Khan for a different section of the Biennale – an invited competition for a musalla or temporary prayer space. The connection to the nature of the biennale is emphasised by the jury chair, Prince Nawaf Bin Ayyaf, who points out that a mosque, once built, cannot be destroyed. ‘The musalla is basically conjoined with the idea of adaptability, of ephemerality, of transience,’ he says. ‘A musalla stems wherever there is a need for prayer, and after that need is gone, the place is no longer there.’ Khan’s proposal included an exterior pavilion and came close to winning.

The successful proposal is in many ways a testimony to the benefit of an invited competition, which provided time and money for research. East Architecture from Lebanon, working closely with engineer AKT II, researched a construction material derived from waste palm fronds. This creates a board that is actually stronger than plywood. Having realised this was viable, the team found a small company in the suburbs of Riyadh that had already taken a similar product to market. They glue-laminated the product and were able to create a material they could not only build with but which was surprisingly alluring – dark but flecked with light moments, like almond chocolate.

It was used in a modular system to build the musalla in less than two months, with a form redolent of houses in Al Balad, the old part of Jeddah, several miles to the south. The intention was that the structure could be relocated there at the end of the event, although other possibilities have since emerged.

This is just one moment in an event that was rich in content, yet contained within temporary structures; less a biennale and more a pop-up museum of historic artefacts and mediations on the Islamic faith. We are perhaps aware that Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 is packed with ambitions for industrial development and construction, but it also makes clear that the country should celebrate and expand its role as the custodian of the two great holy sites of Islam: Medina and Mecca.

The biennale achieves this aim, giving Saudi Arabia a leg up in the Middle East’s cultural soft power game, to which it is a late arrival. As Abu Dhabi looks forward to the inauguration of its billion-dollar Guggenheim building this year, in a far more modest way the Islamic Arts Biennale places Jeddah on an international map for cultural tourism and museological power politics.

Tim Abrahams is a writer and contributing editor to Architectural Record

IN NUMBERS

Total site area 120,000m² 
Scenography 70,000m²
Interior exhibition space 10,000m²
Landscape and outdoor exhibition space 60,000m²