Jonathan Morrison
In the shadow of a Saudi airport, a radical arts festival is taking place
The Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah merges the spiritual and the secular and is full of surprises – and may just offer a vision of how museums might operate in future
Airports are not commonly thought of as places for reflection, for art that stirs the soul, and especially not for tranquillity. But as a point of arrival, as a place where voyages commence, it is perhaps apt that one of the most unusual cultural festivals of recent years has taken as its home the Western Hajj Terminal at the King Abdulaziz Airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, this vast undulating array of cable-stayed canopies – comprising the largest fabric roof in the world when opened in 1981 and inspired by Bedouin tents – still welcomes a million Hajj pilgrims a year at the start of their progression to Mecca, but now hosts the Islamic Arts Biennale as well, adding an extraordinary celebration of history, culture and contemporary art to the starting point of Islam’s sacred journey, one of the five pillars of the faith.
So far, so esoteric, but the Biennale does a lot more than celebrate Islamic art—it reframes it, interrogates it, and uses it as a springboard to explore spirituality, sacredness, and the ineffable through the lenses of tradition and innovation. And it challenges how we perceive sacred space, materiality, and even collective memory via that tension, reaching beyond the confines of a single faith towards something universal.
The decision to structure the Biennale in parts, beginning with sacred objects, means we start with a foundation of Islamic tradition, especially given the inclusion of the Qur’an and the silk and gold covering (known as kiswah) of the Ka’aba in Mecca— the two most universally sacred elements of Islam. Qur’ans from Medina, the second-holiest city, were brought in, lending a gravity that was both symbolic and spiritual. And yet the transition to the contemporary – overseen by curator Dr Julian Raby (a British former director at the Smithsonian) – is smoother than might be expected: we move from objects such as the golden water spout of the Ka’aba and the copper key (1230-1349 CE) that has been entrusted for safekeeping to 100 generations of the same family to a corridor of woven textiles, a chandelier representing prayer as a “supralanguage” — an act that transcends verbal and visual communication — and my personal favourite, Italian artist Arcangelo Sassolino’s Memory of Becoming, a vast rotating black steel disc dripping with industrial oil – the constant flux perhaps suggesting Homer’s “wine-dark sea”. It is a surprisingly successful progression.
The Biennale is held under the soaring canopies of SOM’s Western Hajj Terminal (ISLAMIC ARTS BIENNALE)
The final beauty, which ties everything together, is a glass Qur’an by London-based architect Asif Khan, which is composed of 604 hand-gilded glass folios, and which was originally intended as a centrepoint of a glass musalla, or prayer room (a competition to build one under the SOM canopies was won instead by EAST Architecture Studio, using woven waste materials from local date palm trees). Khan took his inspiration from what he considers to be one of the most beautiful verses of the Qur’an: Chapter Al Nur, verse 34, which describes Allah as the light of the heavens and the earth, “a light upon light”.
As Khan says: “The materials are geological and timeless – glass from silica and gold – but light at same time. For me it expresses the faith that grounds you but allows to connect with something beyond, an unknowable dimension. But at the same time I wanted to create something universal – something connecting all of us, where we can find common ground. We’re all touched by the sacred.”
That idea of building bridges and finding common ground is key to the second part of the biennale, which draws on the collections of prestigious institutions across 21 countries, including the Vatican, to exhibit historically significant works demonstrating the cross-pollination between the Islamic world, in all its vastness and diversity, and the Christian. Here you encounter such items as the oldest dated astrolabe and even the famous Fibonacci manuscript where the concept of zero — long rejected by Catholic tradition — was first introduced into European thought. There are shadow puppets from Indonesia and manuscripts from Timbuktu, and, in one of the more radical departures, a section of woodwork by local women sponsored by the King’s Foundation in the UK, which enabled them to study and practise traditional Islamic arts using techniques drawn directly from historic sites like the Alhambra. This was not tokenism: perhaps for the first time, a significant space within the Islamic arts scene has been held open for voices that have historically been marginalized.
Italian artist Arcangelo Sassolino’s “Memory of Becoming” comprises a vast, spinning disk is coated with a high-viscosity industrial oil and is a metaphor for life’s continuous motion (ISLAMIC ARTS BIENNALE)
But don’t forget the bling: beyond, in a third gallery space, are exhibits from the Al Thani Collection, including the flawless Briolette of India diamond of 90.3 carats, possibly once owned by Eleanor of Aquitaine, alongside ruby-inlaid daggers and a gemstone parrot from 1775. There are swords and suits of armour; everything glints and gleams. No wonder the Biennale has attracted around 600,000 visitors, most of them local.
Outside, a courtyard garden, with work including Osman Yousefzada’s Arrivals installation of stacked stools, the competition-winning musalla and Takashi Kuribayashi’s oil drums, leads to two final exhibition spaces: AlMukarramah (‘The Honoured’) and AlMunawwarah (‘The Illuminated’), full of sacred objects from Medina and Mecca. In these, the undoubted highlight is a 1924 film by Dutch photographer Georgio Krugers that documents the hard journey made by Hajj pilgrims from Indonesia by boat, horse and foot.
It is an extraordinary collection of the sacred and the secular and takes place at a time of unprecedented dynamism in the Saudi cultural landscape, with the past few years witnessing the growth of galleries, art fairs and cultural initiatives across the kingdom. But it also holds plenty of lessons for cosmopolitan outsiders, since it does not merely present artefacts, but tries to reimagine the role of the museum itself. In short, it suggests that the museum of the future should not just be a repository of the past, but a dynamic, living space of interpretation and engagement.
That is particularly useful for Khan, who has been tasked with rehousing the Museum of London in the old market at Smithfield, a project forecast to complete in the next couple of years. “This is a good way to test what a 21st century museum can be, especially the possibility of spirituality existing in equal measure with history,” he says. “Often this is turned down to zero in a normal museum, with sacred objects turned into curios. But here we’ve seen you can let the objects breath and speak.
“So the Biennale has been a special moment, with doors being opened. We were lucky to be here at this point in time. We’re all kind of pilgrims on our own, so what better place to look for meaning and share ideas than here at the Hajj Terminal?”
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