As of May 25, the second edition of the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah will exist only in documentation and in the memories of its fortunate visitors. If you didn’t have the chance to visit the Western Hajj Terminal at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, where the event took place, I must tell you that you missed a profoundly memorable experience.

Described as offering “unique insights into the ways cultures endure in the context of the transformations taking place today in Saudi Arabia with a global frame of reference” (biennale.org.sa), the Biennale does even more by opening new perspectives on culture in general.

Organized by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation, the Biennale was led by Artistic Directors Julian Raby, Amin Jaffer (in his ongoing role as Director of The Al Thani Collection), and Abdul Rahman Azzam. Saudi artist Muhannad Shono served as Curator of Contemporary Art. The exhibition features a dialogue between historical and contemporary works, with over 500 objects displayed across various galleries and outdoor spaces, encompassing 100,000 m² of exhibition space.

With contributions from over 30 institutions worldwide, including The Al Thani Collection, the Louvre in Paris, the V&A in London, and the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo , the Biennale created a remarkable opportunity for cultural dialogue.

Twenty contemporary artists from Saudi Arabia and around the globe were commissioned to explore the intersection between Islamic tradition and modern artistic expression. Sacred objects from the holy cities converse with contemporary interpretations of faith and spirituality, inviting reflection on how art, culture, and nature have been used to understand aspects of the divine.

I was fortunate to be introduced to Amina Diab, an esteemed member of the Biennale’s curatorial team, by long-time friends Joanna Chevalier and Amin Jaffer. Amina is a French-educated Egyptian art historian and curator specializing in modern and contemporary art of the Middle East. Her journey led her to become an Associate Curator for the Biennale.

I had the privilege of conversing with Amina, who kindly shared insights into her experience for this month’s journal.

INTERVIEW

 Habebti Amina, I can’t tell you how happy I am to be able to interview you before the Biennale ends. I know you have a crazy schedule right now, so I’ll try to keep this as concise as possible. Would you mind introducing yourself and telling us what your role has been in the 2025 edition of the Islamic Arts Biennale?

Hi Omar, the pleasure is mine. My name is Amina Diab. I am an Associate Curator for the 2025 edition of the Islamic Arts Biennale. I worked closely with Muhannad Shono, Lead Curator of Contemporary Art and Joanna Chevalier, Associate Curator on the development and realization of the contemporary art commissions. We worked together from the early beginnings to bring the commissions to life, from early conversations with artists, studio visits, artist site visits to curatorial development, production and installation. My role spanned from conceptual development to artist liaison, curatorial research, and facilitating the dialogue between newly commissioned contemporary works and the historical collections on view. I also contributed to the writing of curatorial texts and to shaping the narrative of the Biennale’s contemporary sections, particularly in Al Bidayah and Al Midhallah.

Does your personal heritage influence your curatorial work?
If so (or if not), why and how?

Ah, yes absolutely. So I’m Egyptian, French educated and have lived a large part of my life in the UK. All of these places and the people I have encountered along the way have shaped how I see the world and what I strive to bring in my curatorial practice. I would describe it as openness to multiple ways of seeing and knowing, an approach that is deeply transcultural, transnational, and trans-regional, one that fosters a dialogue and an exchange of ideas. Having spent many years thinking and writing about the Egyptian surrealist group, Art and Liberty, and their radical and rebellious spirits to know the world and make sense of it, this fluid exchange and movement of ideas and more importantly their confidence in their adoption of surrealism, originally a French artistic movement, in 1940s Egypt has inspired me and continues to inform my curatorial thinking today.

In the Islamic Arts Biennale, this openness to the infinite possibilities between the heavens and the earth, and everything in between, resonated with me. Across the different sections, we sought not to describe faith, but to create a space for feeling, thinking, and imagining alternative futures. The selection of artists reflected this multiplicity: some were Saudi, others regional, others international.
It was not about a singular definition of Islamic art, nor about being Muslim necessarily. Some artists had a lived experience of Islam; others lived in places where Islam is practiced; others were visiting Jeddah for the first time. It was important to us that all the artists—especially those coming from outside the region—travel to Jeddah and visit the site of the Biennale to gain a sense of place and context. Their responses were rooted in dialogue and an attentiveness to the local environment. In this way, the Biennale became not only an exhibition but a platform for exchange, where different forms of knowledge and experience could meet and expand the meanings of what Islamic arts can encompass today.

 The second edition of the Islamic Arts Biennale (2025) offered a unique platform to approach faith, culture, and history not as static categories, but as ever-evolving spaces of encounter. Our aim was not to define or describe faith or the sacred, but to promote feelings, thoughts and conversations, encouraging visitors to imagine alternative futures and spaces for connection.
This approach also informed the selection of artists. It was important for us that the contemporary section reflect a range of lived experiences: artists from Saudi Arabia, the wider region, and the international sphere. Some had direct experiences of Islam in their daily lives; others lived in places
where Islam is part of the cultural fabric; others encountered Jeddah and its context for the first time. What united them was not religious identity, but a shared capacity to engage, reflect, and create meaning within this larger conversation. We encouraged all artists — and especially those visiting Saudi Arabia for the first time — to come to Jeddah, to experience the site of the Biennale, and to allow the local environment, history, and atmosphere to inform their work. This commitment to site-responsiveness, to listening as much as producing, was central to our curatorial ethos.

I feel that Arab art is more often than not associated with religion. In the context of the Islamic Biennale, would it be nonsensical to expect some secular perspectives? Do you think the prism of religion can be used to open conversations with the rest of the world? How?

Many of the contemporary commissions for this edition approach the sacred obliquely and opened pathways to consider human experiences through explorations of memory, materiality, ecology, language, the passage of time and collective histories. It was important that the Biennale offered a space where the sacred could be felt rather than prescribed, where visitors could think and feel. Religion here becomes an opening or a way of reflecting on what binds us as human beings, with
our hopes, our rituals, our search for meaning, and offering audiences points of entry into understanding Islamic civilization, culture and its historical continuities.

Do you think your curatorial roles are affected by the fact that you are women, or is it a non-factor?

It would be untrue to say that being a woman does not inform my curatorial practice, in the same way it informs everything else in my life. Of course, it shapes my sense of perception and awareness of which narratives should be brought forward, whose presences are made visible, and how different ways of knowing are given room to breathe. Curating, after all, stems from curare to care, and that care is a responsibility: to create spaces where diverse forms of knowledge and experience can coexist and teach us new things. When I recently curated Every Morning, A Time at Hatch Gallery in Paris bringing together ten women artists across generations and geographies, the fact that they were all women emerged organically. In that sense, my curatorial work remains sensitive to lived experiences and material processes that are often overlooked. Here the focus is on the shared languages of repetition, fragmentation, and the daily labour of making — on the gestures through which these artists navigate memory, place and belonging. That it is an all-women exhibition was not a curatorial directive and in fact I do not mention it at all in the curatorial text. Yet it mattered as the show makes space for lived experience as a form of knowledge and reflected my belief that acts of assembling, reassembling, and sustaining form across time and space are gestures of resistance and world-building.
Similarly, at the Islamic Arts Biennale, this same attentiveness shaped our selection and commissioning approach, in other words we sought to ensure a diversity of artistic voices across gender, geography, and medium. It mattered to us that artist, whether Saudi, regional, or international, would respond to the site and the local context of Jeddah. It is in these gestures of curatorial development that being a woman quietly informs how I work. The selected artists came from different backgrounds. It was important that they respond to the spirit of the place and the theme, not to an imposed definition of faith or identity. What mattered was offering a platform for thinking and feeling and to carve the space for our artists to engage with the sacred, the earthly and the seen and the unseen.

Were your hopes fulfilled with this edition of the Biennale, in just a few words ?

Yes, absolutely. I hoped we could create a space that felt alive, not simply describing, or illustrating
ideas, but offering visitors a space of feeling, reflection, and encounter. I love seeing visitors encounter Nour Jaouda’s Before the Last Sky, the large triptych prayer mat suspended from the ceiling by metal gate frames, after experiencing the majesty of the display of the full Kiswah in the previous space or children interacting with Asim Waqif’s Min Rukam, the large immersive space made up of bamboo and palm fronds that invites the public to strike and hit various parts of the structure to produce different sounds, enhanced and amplified through an embedded electronic system. It was important to me that the artworks were interactive and immersive, walked through, sat with and spoken about, to create these moments of reflection and exchange. As the Biennale welcomes thousands of visitors a day and watching friends, families and school children interact with the works across the Biennale makes me feel that we had achieved something special: an exhibition that holds the vastness of ideas and intimacy of experience. For that, I am profoundly proud.

What are you hoping people will take away and hold onto from this Biennale?

At its heart, the Islamic Arts Biennale invites visitors to step into a space of openness, a space of the infinite possibilities between the heavens and the earth. I hope that visitors will leave carrying with them a sense of this openness: an understanding that meaning is not found in rigid definitions, but made and remade in the in-between spaces, in spaces of encounter, dialogue, and reflection.
In the galleries, the dialogue between contemporary artworks and historical objects shows the historical transcendence of creativity in Islamic art and architecture, showing how contemporary artworks continue traditions of thinking and making. In Al Midhallah under the canopy, the section where the artwork and the garden intertwined in a living landscape, we invite visitors to move through a contemporary Islamic garden, one that roots itself in historic forms of knowledge while grappling with contemporary issues of today including ecology, climate change, social histories, the preservation of craftsmanship and traditional ways of building, and the futures they compel us to imagine. My hope is that future editions of the Biennale will continue to nurture this spirit of openness where the infinite possibilities of the in-between continue to unfold.

I know your schedule is hectic, so I’ll end with a rapid round set of questions to offer a sneak
peek into your inspirational inner garden.

Rapid Round:

Name an artist
Lee Miller

Name an artwork
Portrait of Space, by Lee Miller

Name a book and its author
Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar

Name a city
Actually I will name a village, Tunis village in Fayoum, Egypt.

Name a designer
Margaret Howell

Name a dish
Molokheya, the green soup made of stewed jute leaves, an Egyptian national dish that every one
should try, at least once!

Name a song
El Bosta by Fairuz

Thank you Amina!

To blooming days and openness, a glorious month of May,

Omar