The title, After Rain, opens up a moment of revitalization and renewal, introducing the 2024 Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale as a nurturing entity, filled with life, while acknowledging the necessity of water for all forms of life that dwell and seek shelter on our planet. Unfolding as a combination of practices such as inhabiting, cultivating, harvesting, searching, and sharing, this Biennale presents works that engage with the human-nature continuum, examine the built environment, observe the state of our surrounding landscapes, recount histories, and encourage us to listen more closely. Conceived as a vital entity rather than a static framework, the Biennale welcomes processes, dialogues, performances, and communal meals. The Biennale is a process shaped by first-time meetings and collaborations.

After Rain is a scent that comes from the ground. Moments before it rains—and lingering on well after—a pleasant, earthy odor permeates the air. The smell emanates from a combination of bacteria and plant oils that have accumulated in the rocks and ground during dry periods. During rain, moisture activates the bacteria to produce chemicals (geosemins) to which our noses are extremely sensitive. These, together with plant oils, are carried by the spray of splattering raindrops and the winds. Petrichor is the word scientists have coined for this familiar, luxuriant smell. The Biennale is a multi-sensory experience.

After Rain is an artistic exploration and also a conversation with scientists, architects, researchers, planners, philosophers, writers, and poets, engaging a transgenerational and multinational composition of “caretakers.” All of them shape the experience of this edition through its configuration, its dramaturgy, the knowledge each contribution brings, and the way these are communicated. Our aim with this endeavor is to create spaces of transformative encounters and exchange—spaces in which different types of knowledge foster conversations between diverse communities.

After Rain situates itself within a wider narrative of the coexistence of humans and non-humans. All life-forms are exposed to the effects of climate change—torrential rains, lack of rain, unpredictable rain—and its effects of forced displacement, the destruction of habitats and livelihoods, and the extinction of species. Concerns about access to clean water, food, and shelter have become the norm. Some artworks speak about the hardships and the need for habitation experienced during times of conflict, migration, and dislocation; others reflect on the effects of industrialization, urbanization, and environmental pollution. The ability not only to listen but also to be heard as well as the capacity to cultivate kinship are therefore essential for a livable future.

The 2024 Diriyah Contemporary Arts Biennale, After Rain, presents artworks in all kinds of formats, across seven halls and numerous courtyards and terraces in the JAX District of Diriyah, which is situated along the area’s seasonal riverbed, or wadi. This diverse landscape enables a varied program of performances, concerts, poetry readings, and other activations across different locations and spaces, including performative and discursive spaces across Diriyah; it also extends into the digital realm. For the second edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Ute Meta Bauer has brought together a group of artists from geographies focusing on the Gulf region and Southeast Asia, where she has worked the past ten years as Founding Director of NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and Professor in the School of Art, Design, and Media at Nanyang Technological University.

Co-curator of the Biennale and full-time curator for the Diriyah Biennale Foundation, Wejdan Reda has expanded the Biennale’s narrative by developing commissions and facilitating collaborations. From photographic projects surveying desert settings and cityscapes to performative gatherings and sculptural commissions, these projects are being developed through extended conversations with local experts from different fields, including urban planners, botanists, and local chefs. Artists have been developing their contributions throughout the year through on-site research trips.

Developed by co-curator Anca Rujoiu, the Biennale Encounters is a yearlong event series of talks, conversations, workshops, collective walks, and readings; these have constituted an important component of this edition starting in April 2023, way ahead of the exhibition. Opening up a behind-the-scenes look at the core concerns of this 2024 edition, Biennale Encounters has been growing and nurturing a community around this young Biennale during the months before a wider audience is welcomed to the exhibition.

After the exhibition opens its doors, the Biennale Encounters is furthered and expanded by a performance program shaped by co-curator Rose Lejeune, which punctuates the cadence of the Biennale with events ranging from musically inspired healing sessions to spoken-word performances, sonic activations of works in the exhibition, and performances drawing from the history of theater and dance. The program includes contributions from a younger generation of Saudi and Gulf artists.

Occupying the digital realm, the Learning Garden curated by adjunct curator Rahul Gudipudi is an online space designed to extend the conceptual ground of the exhibition and its programs. It is conceived as an outgrowth and “rewilding” of topics explored by Biennale artists. It also presents materials native to digital experience and a series of commissions that intersect the research threads of the exhibition, while enabling a larger public within and beyond Saudi Arabia to engage with the Biennale.

Operating in parts of the world we are ever unfamiliar with requires an awareness of the historical, political, and contextual specificities of, in this case, a complex and fast-changing region. After Rain has the intent of creating an open map of these developments that are not easily grasped in one comprehensive picture. The word “contemporary” in this Biennale implies—not only for the artists but also for all contributors as a group—A moment, a sensibility, a scent in the air, a direct reference to a specific context and time.

“Feeling the Stones“ was drawn from a saying that emerged during the 1980s as a metaphor for action at a time of social and economic transformation, ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’, which encapsulates considered progress – transformation through intelligent actions, echoing Diriyah Biennale Foundation’s core mission of empowering artistic spirit as a force for meaningful change.

Feeling the Stones was inspired by the cultural fever that swept through China in the 1980s, a decade that saw avant-garde art and social reform take center stage as newly translated ideas helped open society’s minds to new concepts and thoughts.

However, just like social reform, art is a process – incremental, tentative, and, ultimately, directed improvisation. Our theme, Feeling the Stones, was a metaphorical journey through the nuances of artistic production and ideas, unfolding over six sections:

CROSSING THE RIVER

As its starting point, the Biennale looked to the resonance of historical experiences between a newly reforming China and the world that began in late 1978. That year, decades of oppressive state command was overcome by new economic and cultural movements, providing a fascinatingly modern springboard for artistic expression driven by open questions: Is there an aesthetics of reform? How might disparate experiences of historical transition speak to one another? Are there certain questions or characteristics common to moments of epochal change? Some of the works had directly addressed questions of economic transformation and social progress, while others highlighted artists who played a role in their societies’ own artistic emergence.

EXPERIMENTAL PRESERVATION

Can we better understand the past by considering it an unstable product of the present? Inspired by the work of architect Jorge Otero-Pailos, this section looked at a complicated dilemma common to rapidly developing contexts: How to embrace new technologies, practices, and ideas while retaining that which has characterized a culture or a context until now? Artists often come to function in such situations as unreliable narrators: they interrogate monuments, tell stories untold or untrue, and fabricate new realities. Over and against the notions of “heritage” and “tradition”—and in light of ongoing global struggles—how can art set up alternative sites of memory, deconstructing even as it commemorates, questioning even as it articulates?

PERIPHERAL THINKING

The modern era has forced us to rethink time, space, and the relationship between different cultures as a means of universal connection without compromising on sovereignty. A fundamental paradox, however, remains, even as we look to understand gradients of influence and trace lineages of inspiration, we must remind ourselves that all artists retain autonomy and specificity. This section asked how we could think critically about multiple modernisms across nations, regions, and temporalities in light of more recent discussions of intersectionality and multipolarity. What kinds of new conversations might arise, and which old ones might resurface? Which of the paradigms of contemporary art are globally relevant or viable? How do we understand the relations between locales, eras, and styles in times of connectivity and instability?

GOING PUBLIC

Art possesses a unique power to convene communities and envision new forms of solidarity. Especially since the turn of the twenty-first century, artists around the world have turned to social practice, moving beyond earlier ideas of the autonomous work of art and towards art as a language and platform for collective thought and engagement in response to specific circumstances. Through their projects, they create everything from fleeting relations and constructed situations to durable organizations and activist institutions. This section looked across geographies and generations at how artists have worked to spark reflection, format experience, convey knowledge, transmit skills, and ultimately bring people together for a larger purpose.

BRAVE NEW WORLDS

If the COVID-19 pandemic made anything clear, it is the fragility of the order that preceded it. As we emerged from a global event that has afflicted the global systems out of which it has grown, we began to imagine new realities. For years already, artists have been contemplating the Anthropocene and proposing other possibilities in the face of untenable consumption, acceleration, and warming. Faced with new restrictions on mobility and a heightened consciousness of human vulnerability, artists asked: What might a future look like that builds on the lessons of this transnational crisis?

CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL

Artists today work beyond the horizons of a specific history or geography, often examining, channeling, and convening with the transcendent. Some work and innovate in established religious lineages, while others seek sustenance from unlikely sources. In a nation of sacred places, art’s special relationship to the deeper, lingering questions of human existence resurfaces in new and powerful ways. This final section looked at how artists, particularly at times of upheaval and transition, have attempted to make sense of their worlds and the beliefs that structure them.