Desert X AlUla 2024 dazzles in its role as a prototype for Saudi Arabia’s permanent land art park, with site-specific installations by native and international artists
The theme for Desert X AlUla 2024 – on until 23 March, the latest land art exhibition from the California-founded Desert X organisation – is making the invisible visible, with the title ‘In the Presence of Absence’. The desert being a place of winds and mirages, dust-clouded perception and desire’s imaginative projections, the 18 commissioned artists – including Giuseppe Pennone,and Ayman Yossri Daydban – played with notions of illusion.
Two more installations stood out for their minimalist poetry that evoked deep feeling while leaving the lightest footprint, both using ancient methods of refining natural materials to play with sunlight as it shifts from morning to night. For her work, Lebanese Caline Aoun took some of the black volcanic fragments covering AlUla’s high plateau site at Harrat Uwayrid and polished them in the traditional way, sanding one side using only water.
While Saudi pursues its arts masterplan with the kind of gusto only made possible by its rocket-fuel cocktail of enthusiasm, ambition and eye-wateringly deep funds, this largest economy in the Middle East has the benefit of learning from the trials of its smaller, faster Gulf neighbours.
The most moving of all the commissions is an untitled performance choreographed by British-born artist of German-Indian descent Tino Sehgal. Connecting powerfully with the live experience of the visitor, three performers move animalistically across a slope of fractured shards, harmonising haunting ‘Om’ vocals as they unfurl and approach you. They are strange yet they are you, and vulnerable to the elements; the phenomenology of being human is felt intensely.