Afra Al Dhaheri, Dining East or West?, 2016
The third edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, In Interludes and Transitions, unfolds across the JAX District through May 2, 2026, assembling more than 65 artists from over 37 countries alongside an ambitious slate of new commissions. Led by Co-Artistic Directors Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed, the exhibition resists the conventions of a geographic survey, instead positioning movement defined by migration, exchange, procession – as both its curatorial framework and a defining condition of the contemporary. Here, movement is treated not as metaphor but as a structure through which culture is continuously made and remade.
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A plexiglass table balanced on cinder blocks anchors an installation scattered with glass casts of limbs and domestic fragments, suspended between rupture and cohesion. The work reflects on shifting social rituals – particularly traditions of gathering and dining – without settling into nostalgia. Instead, Al Dhaheri constructs a space of cultural in-betweenness, where infrastructure and memory press uneasily against one another.