The Saudi crown prince is creating wildly ambitious projects masterminded by renowned architects, curators and designers. The upshot is either progressive modernisation or image-laundering, depending who you ask“We think we can help change the situatio…
The Saudi crown prince is creating wildly ambitious projects masterminded by renowned architects, curators and designers. The upshot is either progressive modernisation or image-laundering, depending who you ask
“We think we can help change the situation here,” says Iwona Blazwick, who for 21 years was director of the Whitechapel art gallery in London, “particularly for women.” She’s wearing, like many westerners working in Saudi Arabia, a stylish version of the abaya, the traditional garment that extends to ankles, wrists and neck, but with her head uncovered. Around us is the profligate splendour of the cliffs and pillars of the local geology, not lunar or Martian but from some stranger planet, its bare wind-carved forms suggesting beasts and faces. We’re in the north-western region of AlUla, at the two-year-old Habitas resort, where 96 luxury cabins, each containing one bedroom, are scattered across an arid but spectacular valley like a high-end, low-density trailer park. A succession of influencers, posing in front of tripod-mounted phones, bring a Triangle of Sadness vibe to the infinity pool. It’s not the Saudi Arabia of the popular imagination.
Blazwick has been a leading force in British art over the past three decades: in 1992, she gave Damien Hirst his first major public London show, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and she played a significant role in the creation of Tate Modern. She is now overseeing Wadi AlFann, or Valley of the Arts, a park of land art to be made out of 65 sq kilometres (25 sq miles) of AlUla’s scenic desert. Here three venerable giants of the genre, Agnes Denes, James Turrell and Michael Heizer, with the Saudi artists Manal AlDowayan and Ahmed Mater, are planning to carve and build their large creations out of the rock and sand. It will take to the limit the proposition that art can change the world for the better.
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