Elias Sime, Rand Abdul Jabbar, and Yazan Khalili at the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2026

In Interludes and Transitions / في الحِلّ والترحال — the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2026 — unfolds as a meditation on movement, continuity, and transformation. Conceiving the world as a constellation of processions, the Biennale draws its title from a colloquial expression rooted in the nomadic histories of the Arabian Peninsula, evoking cycles of encampment and journey, presence and departure. Within this framework of perpetual flux, the Biennale invites audiences to reconsider the world in motion—where human experience is inseparable from planetary, multi-species, spiritual, and technological currents.

 

Among the participating artists, Elias Sime, Rand Abdul Jabbar, and Yazan Khalili present works that powerfully resonate with the Biennale’s conceptual terrain, each engaging questions of memory, materiality, and movement through distinct yet interwoven practices.

 

Rand Abdul Jabbar presents A Tale Before the Deluge (2026), a newly commissioned installation for the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale. Composed of wooden brick moulds, clay, and charcoal on linen, the work reflects Abdul Jabbar’s ongoing investigation into the afterlives of places and the narratives embedded within material culture. Working across sculpture, writing, video, and installation, she constructs spaces where recollection and imagination converge. In A Tale Before the Deluge, archaeological forms and fragile materials become vessels for memory, gesturing toward submerged histories and the tenuous transmission of knowledge across time.

 

Yazan Khalili participates in the Biennale with a new commissioned artwork titled We Learned Our Language in Our Dreams. Khalili’s practice often explores the politics of representation, language, and place, particularly in relation to Palestine and its diasporas. This new work reflects on language as both an inherited and imagined construct—shaped by displacement, aspiration, and the subconscious. Within the Biennale’s broader inquiry into processions and transitions, Khalili’s contribution foregrounds the movement of language itself, carried across generations, geographies, and inner worlds.

 

Elias Sime showcases two works from his Lines in Nature series—Lines in Nature 2 and Lines in Nature 3. Renowned for his transformative use of technological materials, Sime assembles colourful electrical wires, circuit boards, and electronic components into intricate, densely layered compositions. His practice collapses distinctions between technology and nature, abstraction and ecology, proposing instead a deeply interconnected visual language. In the context of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Sime’s works resonate as material processions in their own right—charts of human innovation entwined with organic systems and planetary rhythms.

 

Together, the works of Sime, Abdul Jabbar, and Khalili articulate varied responses to a world in constant transition. Through material experimentation, poetic inquiry, and conceptual rigor, their practices embody the Biennale’s vision of continuity within motion—of being perpetually in interludes and transitions.