FORM FOLLOWS EROSION

In the northwestern Saudi Arabian city of AlUla, the wind loosens chips of quartz from enormous sandstone mounds, carving cavities all across the mountains’ faces. Repeated over millions of years, and an entire 23,000-square-kilometre landscape is rendered pocked and undulating, riddled with a texture that triggers intense feelings of both wonder and awe. For the last 7,000-odd years, this landmark topography has backdropped human life in the valley’s every frame. And from 2021, it has set the scene for the AlUla Arts Festival.

Initiated by the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCA) in 2020 as part of the greater Vision 2030 effort to reduce Saudi Arabia’s economic dependence on oil, the AlUla Arts Festival seeks to develop the region into a hub for creative and cultural exchange — a decided move past preservation and towards innovation. Observing its fifth edition at the start of the year, from January 16th to February 14th, the 2026 Festival promised to be “the most diverse yet,” spotlighting a host of local, regional, and international artists, designers, and craftspeople. The result was a tapestry of developing and realized works from both emerging and established figures — all set in conversation with AlUla’s natural, cultural, and material legacy. In this oasis city, heritage stands as the foundational source from which everything blooms. All one has to do is look, learn, plant, and let grow.

DESERT X ALULA

Riffed off Southern California’s Desert X Coachella, Desert X AlUla invites visitors to engage with site-specific works in an open-air exhibition. Themed “Space Without Measure” as a nod to Lebanese-American writer Kahlil Gibran, this year’s presentation — curated by Wejdan Reda and Zoé Whitley — reflected on the infinite and unceasing nature of the human spirit, drawing a mirror to the perceived boundlessness of the place of AlUla. Materially engaging that act of reflection and dialogue between work and site, human and land, inspired and inspiration, the eleven works featured were great in size, weight, and effect, beckoned to the formation of the mountains, and amplified the rhythms of oasis soil. Bahraini-Danish’s aluminum Bloom played with shadow, wind, and touch to emulate the region’s native flora in a 42-foot tall interactive kinetic sculpture. Tarek Atoui’s The Water Song voiced the droning sound of dropping water through seven hollow structures half-buried in the ground. Agnes Denes’s latest iteration of The Living Pyramid covered a tiered, earth-toned structure in a total of 1,970 plants native to the region.

Most of these works have now been dismantled, in keeping with Desert X’s core principle of leaving no trace. Denes’s piece is an exception — it will remain tucked away in an oasis a few miles away from the main Desert X site for a full year, allowing the flora move through each season. It also serves as a preview of Wadi AlFann (“Valley of the Arts”), a large-scale permanent art destination planned for the desert canyons of AlUla, where Denes is among the first five artists commissioned to create a monumental work.

WADI ALFANN

RCA’s mission to “craft the next chapters in a millennia of artistic creation — celebrating cultural inheritance and shaping a future inspired by artists built by artists,” is obviously wildly ambitious, but Wadi AlFann might surpass that audaciousness. Set to be unveiled in 2030, the sprawling commission of wildly monumental land art works will see titans in the field place indelible mark on AlUla’s geographic and cultural landscapes. James Turrell, Michael Heizer, and Agnes Denes are among the “pioneers and icons of land art,” as the project’s curator and director Iwona Blazwick and Annette Gibbons-Warren rightfully labels them, set to start occupying Wadi AlFann later this year.

Proposing another of his signature Skyspaces which explore the interaction between light, color, space, and perception, Turrell’s offering will frame an aerial window that looks out onto the cosmos through a constellation of chambers flooded with prismatic light, accessed through a network of tunnels and chambers flooded with prismatic light, all set into the center of a mountain. Proposed as an implementation of all he’s learned in his 60-year-long career, the Wadi AlFann proposal will be second only to his life’s work: the ongoing Roden Crater project in Northern Arizona, which he started nearly 50 years ago. 95-year old Denes’s proposal — a crystal pyramid at the end of a path of six giant rock carvings iterating on the prehistoric drawings that mark the valley’s sandstone with camel illustrations and early Arabic script — will be the lasting monument in her legacy: an honor (and pressure) neither Blazwick or Gibbons-Warren are taking lightly.

Michael Heizer’s contribution will also mark itself upon the sandstone rock with illusory petroglyphs that will appear to move and fall into place when viewed from different vantage points. Emulating City, his monumental sculpture in Central Eastern Nevada, these desert drawings will hold no singular perspective. Rather, their total composition will only be viewed in parts, encouraging a more deliberate engagement with work at such large a scale.

In commissioning these artists, Wadi AlFann isn’t recruiting these pioneers as a flex — it’s asking what their work means when placed in conversation with a landscape thousands of years in the making. And accompanying them are two of Saudi’s most influential contemporary artists working today: Manal AlDowayan and Ahmed Mater. With Ashab Al-Lal, Mater attempts to bring about the otherworldly, developing a 15-metre play with optics alongside a team of astrophysicists that will send projections of the subterranean oculus’ visitors back above ground in a mirage. In a similar gesture of making the invisible visible, AlDowayan, who represented her homeland at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, will construct and cover a replica of the historic maze of AlUla’s Old Town with drawings made by the townspeople.

Sensitive to the fact that AlUla’s civilizations have come to be known through their surviving art and architecture, from the Dadanites to the Nabataeans, Wadi AlFann is not just looking to add to the canon of land art, but to add to the preexisting collage of the valley’s cultural strata. With multiple legacies in mind, Wadi AlFann is being built as a living museum to last a millennia.

Once groundbreaking begins, the 25-square-mile valley (a fraction of which we traversed by foot on our visit in January) will be cordoned off from public view. Other than the teams materializing the installations, those desert canyons will be roamed only by the desert foxes and other wildlife whose footprints we had driven across on that windy Saturday morning.

ALULA DESIGN RESIDENCY

If the bulk of the Festival program focused on the sandstone mountains, the AlUla Design Residency looked instead to another omnipresent feature in the AIUIa landscape: the date palm trees. Curated by Dominique Petit-Frère, a cultural practitioner, design strategist, and co-founder of both the Limbo Accra research studio and the Limbo Museum in Ghana, the second edition of the AlUla Design Residency program invited five designers to take up three-month stays in the city, working under the theme of “Designing Within.” Researching and conceptualizing works influenced by the rich landscapes and the heritage and craft traditions of AlUla, each of the residency’s participants were tasked with developing realizable urban installations and furniture pieces that could slot into the city’s existing infrastructure.

Drawing on local resources and traditional know-how, the participating Altin Studio, Aseel Alamoudi, Ori Orisun Merhav, Paul Ledron, and Studio ThusThat produced works transforming all sorts of plant and insect matter, and “translating the region’s distinct cultural fabric into functional and poetic design.” A week into the Festival program, full-scaled prototypes of the proposals were showcased in Material Witness: Celebrating Design from Within at Design Space AlUla, the arts district’s newly-opened gallery, archive, and workshop.

As Arnaud Morand, Head of Art and Creative Industries at the French Agency for AlUla Development, puts it, “place is resource.” Petit-Frère phrases it differently. “Arriving in AlUla … the land doesn’t just surround you, it addresses you — not with spectacle, but with a quiet, insistent energy. And within that energy, a question arises: What will you offer that truly belongs?”