The Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah spotlights heritage, creativity and faith
Maghie Ghali

Open until May 25, the art event is back for its second edition
Returning for its second edition, the Islamic Arts Biennale combines ancient Islamic culture and heritage with contemporary artist creations, anchored by Jeddah’s legacy as a historic crossroads of cultures, peoples, and faiths.
Open until May 25, 2025, the Diriyah Biennale Foundation is staging the event at the Western Hajj Terminal of King Abdulaziz International Airport, a site familiar to millions of Muslim pilgrims embarking on their pilgrimages for Hajj and Umrah every year.
This year’s edition, titled And all that is in between, takes its theme from part of a verse that appears several times in the Quran: “And God created the Heavens and the Earth and all that is in between.”
Poetically interpreted as humanity’s creativity being a gift from the heavens, the creative art show takes a look at earthly creations and how they intersect with the divine.
“The ‘in between’ refers to these potentialities of human creation, where we as humans can express our inner self, inspired by God to conceive beautiful things, such as gardens that look like the heavens, mosques that celebrate the beauty of God, or sacred objects that venerate aspects of faith and religion,” explains Joanna Chevalier, the associate curator of the Islamic Arts Biennale. “It’s the space for humans to innovate, imagine and calculate, applied to mathematics, architecture, botany and medicine, but also music, writing and illumination.”
“Beautiful objects, made thanks to human skills – it’s the area where you can explore all these imaginative and creative potentialities, because when someone crafts a unit of measurement or a map, it starts in the brain, in the imagination,” she adds.
Carefully curated by a team of artists and experts, led by Artistic Directors Julian Raby, Amin Jaffer – in his ongoing role as Director of The Al-Thani Collection – and Abdul Rahman Azzam, alongside Saudi artist Muhannad Shono as Curator of Contemporary Art, the Biennale will be spread across five exhibition halls and
outdoor spaces.
It will place over 500 historical objects and newly commissioned contemporary artworks by 20 artists in conversation with one another, exploring the way Islamic art and culture have spread and evolved over the centuries, juxtaposed with contemporary works inspired by or responding to the artefacts.
“What is absolutely magnificent in this Biennale is that it shows the dynamics of the Islamic world in human history, its thinking and innovations, spread all over the world from Asia to Africa and Europe,” Chevalier says. “Among these institutional loans, we also have two remarkable collections – The Al-Thani Collection, and The Furusiyya Art Foundation Collection, which is dedicated to Islamic chivalry.”
The Biennale will consist of seven thematic sections spread across the 100,000-square-metre space, each exploring a different facet of religious, cultural and artistic intersection – AlBidaya, AlMadar, AlMuqtani, AlMathala, Makkah al-Mukarramah, Al-Madinah al-Munawwarah,
and AlMusalla.
Visitors will start their journey at AlBidaya (‘The Beginning’), which invites viewers to contemplate the sacred, and how it can be represented through tangible objects but still remain unknown. Paying tribute to Jeddah’s role as a gateway to Islam’s Holy Cities, the opening galleries will display artefacts from Makkah al-Mukarramah and Al-Madinah al-Munawwarah. Contemporary artworks will explore these questions and open the mind to examining theology.
AlMadar (‘The Orbit’) will spotlight the fascinating collections from institutions from over 20 countries, presenting selected objects that represent celestial navigation, the mapping of oceans and rivers, and mathematical calculations, which demonstrate how Muslim cultures have used numbers to comprehend God’s creation and to bring order and symmetry into everyday life.
“Iraqi artist Mehdi Moutashar, who was fascinated by mathematics as he considers every living needs to define himself but what surrounds him, and in particular the geographical realities – by creating objects of measurement that allow him to travel and find his directions,” Chevalier says. “Mehdi created a gigantic and symbolic astrolabe titled ‘Alidade’, which combines two elements – a floor, very precisely measured, and two vertical elevations, oriented with the greatest precision toward Mecca. The alidade is one of the parts of an astrolabe, a movable ruler used to carry out all calculations of time and space.”
“And then you have a very well-known artist in the region, Timo Nasseri, who worked on the Islamic architectural feature of the Muqarnas,” she continues. “He created a suspended installation made from many cut mirrors, like flying birds (inspired by the 12th-century Sufi poem The Conference of the Birds), which form the shape of a Muqarnas if you stand under it at a certain angle.”
AlMuqtani (‘Homage’) has no contemporary interventions, instead simply displaying the wonders of the Al Thani Collection, characterised by a focus on precious creations made with incredible artistry, such as jewelled objects, alongside The Furusiyyah Art Foundation Collection.
The outdoor spaces of AlMathala (‘The Canopy’) will present a range of new commissions that respond to the theme of the garden, a place of respite and renewal, in Islamic civilisation. Artists in this section will reflect on the natural wonders and environmental issues of our modern world.
AlMukarramah (‘The Honoured’) and AlMunawwarah (‘The Illuminated’), referring to the two Holy Cities, will comprise two permanent pavilions, centred around human stories and the melting pot of peoples and cultures that have passed through the cities.
AlMusalla, the final section, celebrates Islamic architecture through the inaugural AlMusalla Prize, seeking to build a functioning prayer space (a musalla) on the Biennale site. The winning design, titled ‘On Weaving’, by East Architecture Studio, in collaboration with AKT II, Rayyane Tabet, and Sweco, is a modular, easily moveable musalla that experiments with local building materials like date palm waste and traditional weaving methods.
“Saudi artists have always been talented, and in the last few years, they’re finally getting the exposure they deserve,” Chevalier says. “This Biennale really shows how Islam spread and influenced the world, further than what people nowadays think they know of Islam. Here, we have cultures from Uzbekistan, Ethiopia, Timbuktu, the ancient Babylonians and Ottomans, and Persia, all under one roof.”
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