Basmah Felemban
‘Murmur of Pebbles’
The Jeddah-born artist’s work “explores the valley as a living archive of movement and time,” according to the show catalogue. It draws on the lore of Felemban’s fictional creation, the catfish-like Jirry tribe, whom she has previously described as “wandering creatures that mine data from the land to guide their travels.”
She continued: “Their elders teach that every pebble carries a memory of motion carved by floods, smoothed by collisions, and molded by the push and pull of time. From holding and rolling a single pebble in their hand, a Jirry can read the history of the valley’s waters and winds. … Subtle imbalances in curvature record cycles of collision, rest, and reactivation, allowing the pebble’s form itself to speak of motion, duration, and change.”
In her statement for the exhibition, Felemban wrote: “Both the pebble and (the valley’s sandstone cavities) are calculators of time. The Jirry and I leave this knowledge as an offering to the valley and its creatures, to navigate the land through feeling its sediments. We invite you to approach the valley slowly and with curiosity, as it speaks in fragments and murmurs, and the act of listening is a response to its call.”
Bahraini-Danish
‘Bloom’
Bahraini-Danish is an art collective consisting of Batool Alshaikh, Maitham Almubarak, and Christian Vennerstrøm Jensen. They were previously designers in residence in AlUla. Their work for Desert X is a monumental pipe structure with plant-like elements — a response to the desert’s interplay of shadow and sunlight. When the wheels are turned, the kinetic structures shift, causing the shadows they cast to move as well.
“(The structure itself) is really only part of the artwork,” the show’s co-curator (along with Wejdan Reda) Zoé Whitley told Arab News. “For them, it was so much about the way the light moves across the sky, and the way the wildflowers cast these incredibly beautiful, but also ephemeral, shadows on the land.”
Agnes Denes
‘The Living Pyramid’
The Hungarian-born US-based artist is a pioneer of ecological and land art and one of the key motifs of her work is the pyramid. “The idea of geometry is key to all her work. She’s planted entire forests across many different locations in geometric patterns because she wants to combine living things with the Euclidean abstraction of geometry,” Iwona Blazwick, the curator of Wadi AlFann, told Arab News.
In Desert X, Denes’ four-sided pyramid is layered with 1,970 plants native to the area selected by the artist herself under the guidance of an expert botanist. The work is an exploration of the cycles of life, from soil to seed to blossom.
“There will always be the oppressors and the insulated ones, people whose privileges give them higher altitude, and those who swim in the mire of adversity. My pyramids are an ointment to ease the wound. An optimistic edifice,” Denes says in her artist statement. “My work gives my visual philosophy form, beauty and power. Because to convey brutal facts, you need all these. The cycles of life renew from soil to seed, to plant, to blossom. The science of its structure — its eloquence, its meaning — speaks many languages, and to all humanity.”
Ibrahim El-Salahi
‘Haraza Tree’
The Sudanese modernist artist’s installation is a forest of sculptural meditation trees inspired by the resilient acacias that grow throughout AlUla’s canyons. It envisions unity emerging from multiplicity.
“He started this particular series, ‘The Meditation Tree,’ when he was in his eighties in the year 2000,” Reda explained. “It was always his dream to create a forest of those meditation trees. (We were happy) to be able to help facilitate that vision. It links also with the opportunity to dream and to imagine the possibilities that could unfold throughout this landscape.”
El-Salahi says in his artist statement: “One tree is represented many times in the same form to represent the many aspects of the great human society. The only differences are in colors and cultures, but we are basically all the same — of the same origin — with the many representing the one. I see the series as an ongoing investigation of … the link between heaven and earth, creator and created.”
Vibha Galhotra
‘In Future Fables’
The Delhi-based artist, whose practice centers climate change and environmental degradation, repurposes fragments of AlUla’s demolished buildings in her installation. The rubble becomes an enclosed shelter — a meditative space to reflect on the past and imagine new futures. “We all know about climate change and the wrongdoings, but we are saying ‘I don’t know what to do.’ That’s the kind of thing I would like to reflect on,” Galhotra said.
The artist’s work, Whitley said, has “long been committed to thinking about not only the climate emergency, but what we do as human beings to constantly be on a quest for some kind of future improvement and perfection, but creating a wave of destruction along the way. To tear something down, to build something new… what's lost in that process?
“What may at first seem hard is actually this beautiful elliptical hug, this gathering place, and it will be activated throughout the course of Desert X for people to tell stories, for poems to be written and listened to.”
