RIYADH: Archiving Saudi Arabia’s art history has been a pivotal focus of the local scene over the past few years, and this week a symposium at the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale highlights those efforts.
The four-day Research Room event runs from April 22 to 25. Artists and researchers from across the world will explore the relationship between art and everyday life through a multidisciplinary approach under the theme ‘Timekeepers: The Archive in Flux.’
“Saudi has gone through a massive cultural shift in recent years, and people are adapting,” the director of public programs at the Diriyah Biennale Foundation, Sybel Vazquez, tells Arab News. “The city is changing. People's habits are changing. This is, I think, an extremely urgent time to not necessarily relish in the past, but to think about what it is that we keep.”
Thinking about research in the context of community engagement and involving the general public releases it from the confines of academia.
“We found that in the first edition (of Research Room) last year, our community really came together across ages,” Vazquez says. “You had people who either wanted to engage in further research, because they were led by their curiosity or people discover practices that they never knew about, and they want to introduce new practices into their own. There are so many different things that can happen in that symposium.”
The event is led by a main panel discussion daily: beginning with working with fragments in archiving, moving on to oral histories and storytelling, archiving in the digital age, and finally, whose memory matters.
Aside from talks, the program will feature film screenings, workshops, film archiving and negative scanning, listening sessions, and masterclasses, and will culminate in a showcase of the biennale’s micro-residency participants’ research works.
“We're not educating anyone about what has to be done. It's about what the community needs,” says Vazquez. “How do they engage with this notion in their everyday — from photographs to storytelling, even to recipe-keeping, to what gets told from mother to daughter to grandchild. What are all these beautiful stories that will be lost if we don't pay attention?”
