Riyadh’s cultural season is in full swing, and the Saudi Museum of Contemporary Art (SAMoCA) has just added a major highlight to the calendar. The fourth Saudi edition of BIENALSUR, the sprawling international biennial of contemporary art from South America, has opened at SAMoCA in JAX, Diriyah bringing together artists from across continents in a playful, participatory show about choice, chance, and imagination.
Running until 31 December, this marks BIENALSUR’s tenth anniversary and its continued expansion across more than 70 cities and 140 institutions worldwide.
Titled Let’s Play: A Labyrinth of Options, the Riyadh edition brings together 26 Said I and international artists exploring ideas of choice, chance, and imagination. Curated by BIENALSUR Artistic Director Diana Wechsler, the exhibition transforms SAMoCA into a space of movement and interaction where visitors are not just viewers, but participants in a larger experiment in perception and play.
The partnership between BIENALSUR and the Saudi Museums Commission reflects the Kingdom’s growing commitment to positioning contemporary art as a site of dialogue and exchange. For SAMoCA, a museum still in its early chapters, the collaboration reinforces its mission to foster cultural exchange, empower local talent, and expand access to contemporary art across Saudi Arabia.
At the opening, audiences experienced installations that combined light, sound, and motion, immersive works designed to be touched, moved through, and experienced in real time. The result is a dynamic, family-friendly environment where the boundaries between artist and audience blur.
Running alongside the main exhibition are two satellite programmes that expand the biennial’s reach.
SAFAR, an outdoor concert series, turns the museum into a stage for cultural and musical collaboration. Highlights include French electro-chill collective Bon Entendeur (28 October), Nigerian “Blufunk” pioneer Keziah Jones (12 November), and Love and Revenge, a duo reimagining the legacy of Oum Kulthoum through electronic music and cinematic visuals (7 December).
Meanwhile, MUNTADA SAMoCA will host a weekend programme of workshops, panel discussions, and film screenings under the theme Focus on Image: Tools, Language and its Power. The initiative looks at how images are made, read, and shared today, inviting audiences to rethink the visual vocabulary of contemporary culture.
As Saudi Arabia’s cultural ecosystem continues to expand, BIENALSUR joins a growing constellation of initiatives shaping the national art calendar from Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale to Noor Riyadh’s city-wide light installations and Desert X AlUla’s cross-continental collaborations.
See below for images of some of the art works and installations at BIENALSUR:
