Saudi Arabia’s burgeoning art scene

A little more than a century ago, a charismatic British army captain called T.E. Lawrence and fearsome Bedouin warriors swept through the sublime canyons around the desert city of Al-’Ula where I stroll today. They blew up the Hejaz railway, built to transport hajjis from Damascus towards Mecca but repurposed during the first world war by Turks to ferry munitions and troops. Such was the 1916-18 Arab Revolt that threw off Arabia’s Ottoman yoke.

Today a very different kind of Arab uprising is sweeping through Al-’Ula. The canyons resonate not with bombs but with art. Dubai-based Zeinab Alhashemi has constructed boulders made from camel hides for a piece called ‘Camouflage 2.0’. Fitting since the Quran mentions Al-’Ula as the miraculous site where a she-camel was summoned from rock by the prophet Saleh as a sign to pagan locals from Allah. Ramallah-based Khalil Rabah, meanwhile, has planted a square orchard of olive trees in the pitiless desert.

Western artists are also working here. Californian land artist Jim Denevan hired gigglingly mystified local workers to help build 365 concentric mounds of sand for an Ozymandian piece of contemporary art that in time will be levelled by the breezes. Even the rusting old tracks of the Hejaz railway figure: Warsaw-based Monika Sosnowska has artfully twisted and planted them in sand, making a steel bouquet bloom in the desert.

All these and more are part of the Desert X AlUla biennial, an open-air public art festival the second edition of which has just opened in northwestern Saudi Arabia. It’s a region into which the millennial Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is pouring billions of dollars for a regeneration project that, Saudi fingers crossed, will make the mighty emirs of the Persian Gulf, despite their Louvre Abu Dhabi and Qatari World Cup, despair.

‘By 2035,’ says Nora Aldabal, arts and creative planning director at the Royal Commission of Al-’Ula, ‘Al-’Ula will be home to 15 landmark destinations for culture, heritage and creativity, each designed in careful dialogue with the region’s unique natural landscape, including museums, galleries, research centres and arts districts.’