Agenda

The 2024 edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale takes place in the JAX District in Diriyah, a town adjacent to the capital city of Riyadh and home to the UNESCO World Heritage Site of At-Turaif. The curatorial team of the 2024 Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale is led by globally renowned curator Ute Meta Bauer as Artistic Director, with Co-Curators: Wejdan Reda (SA), Anca Rujoiu (RO) and Rose Lejeune (UK), and with Adjunct Curator Rahul Gudipudi (IN). Together, they bring experiences and insights from diverse geographic backgrounds, extending the Biennale exhibition with artistic formats such as performance, sound, research-based practices, and digital forms.

Opening on February 24th, Design Doha is a landmark biennial dedicated to creative innovation. We are here to foster the design culture of the MENA region, and create a space of design excellence in Qatar.

Design Doha will be an elevating movement, serving as a dedicated platform for fostering creativity and design excellence. It provides creatives and institutions with a space to showcase their designs and ideas. This biennial is committed to offering tangible and authentic solutions, showcasing the richness of MENA culture and creativity, while highlighting the exceptional design environment of Qatar on the global stage.

“Food in performance puts food at the intersection of cultural identities, desire, disgust and other social, psychological and physiological modes of excess. An augmentation and bending of everyday life, this performance addresses cultural relationships to food and how they perform culturally, and a critique on technological times.

This proposal is a durational and, at times, interactive performance involving food preparation, and an extension of Dalia’s recent work incorporating her projected, augmented, hyper-realistic digital avatar, in motion. The performance will feature her physical body preparing a large amount/pile of tabbouleh, one of the most emblematic local dishes, in times of crisis.

Tabbouleh (much like hummus), has made an appearance in Guinness World Records with the world’s largest serving, oscillating between self-fetishization and a contested, appropriated culinary symbol. Through the delicate and poignant act of cutting, dicing, chopping, mincing, and ripping, the choreographed body is in labor. The movements, in their simple mechanics, incorporate micro-aggressions, subtle tensions, and a poetic temporal deconstruction that slows and bends time. Each gesture is performative.

In the background, her avatar will also be in labor, reenacting, performing the food preparation process through pre-recorded movements in a more amplified manner. The avatar will resonate different emotional states through movements, like an amplified resonance. This creates the illusion of watching a woman perform her thoughts, transforming an idyllic, stereotypical kitchen into a psychedelic décor.

As the performance progresses, she will alternate between food preparation and synchronized pauses, dance breaks, small naps, and rest periods. When this occurs, she outsources the work to her digital simulation. This examines the outsourcing of cooking practices, the reliance on automated assistance, robot chefs, mechanized food preparation, and kitchens aids.The food prepared will be either distributed for any passerby or audience member, or donated.

Dalia Khalife is a hybrid; an artist, a scenographer, a multidisciplinary designer, and a dancer. She is currently a professor at the Lebanese American University.

She work intuitively, in an interdisciplinary manner, across installation, site-specific interventions, video, objects, painting and performative gestures to produce situations where viewers occupying the same space produce its meaning. Her practice examines psychophysiological happenings as well as elements of spectacle and play within power structures, social events, and rituals, that manifest as primitive moments of ambiguity and shared vulnerability.”

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“Fares Thabet’s paintings capture landscapes of great complexity and paradoxical serenity. He explores perception and perspective to reveal compositions that introduce scenes of his strolls or of his imaginary pictorial universe. Strongly influenced by the Mediterranean landscape, he handles his color, seeks its vibration and luminous intensity by experimenting with various painting techniques. His approach is centered on color and light as medium and language to depict his landscapes.
In 2014 he graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Complutense University of Art in Madrid, Spain. He also obtained a certificate of higher education from Francisco Alcań tara School of Ceramics.

Thabet has participated in group exhibitions in Spain and Tunisia, including Climbing Through the Tide, B7L9 Art Station, Tunis, Tunisia; Summer Show and On a Blade of Grass, Selma Feriani Gallery, Tunis, Tunisia. His work is part of The Museum of African Contemporary Art, Al Maaden (MACAAL), Marrakech, Morocco, and private collections in Spain, Belgium, Germany, the U.S.A, Tunisia and more.”

“Tunisian artist Jellal Ben Abdallah draws on his ancestral imagination to honour fragments from his Mediterranean and Tunisian surroundings. He proceeds with a technical and delicate minuteness in depicting animate and inanimate subjects altogether. A painter of “feminine ritual”, women in traditional Tunisian attires, as well as motifs from domestic interiors largely occupy his frames, as he captures them with a substance of nobility and divinity. Intricate patterns, graceful and idyllic figures, and ethereal landscapes are constructed through the miniaturist’s lens authentically and nostalgically.
After studying at the Lycée Carnot, he settled in Sidi Bou Saïd in 1939 where his painting journey started. Since then, he has never lived anywhere else or pursued any other profession.
His inaugural exhibition dates back to 1939, which became an annual tradition as he has held one every year (including during the war years, to quote him). Beyond the shores of Tunisia, Jellal Ben Abdallah has personally exhibited in Stockholm, Paris, Madrid and Cairo and in most major capitals.
In addition to painting, Jellal Ben Abdallah has worked on building decoration (Tunisian Pavilion, Cité Universitaire of Paris, Brussels Universal Exhibition 1958), mosaics, stained glass, murals and ceramics. Several television programs have been dedicated to him (RTT, A2 – RAI…). He has also designed several series of postage stamps.”