The Islamic Arts Biennale, launched by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation, which has also run the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale since 2021, is staged on the grounds of the iconic Hajj Terminal at the King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the building is an architectural and engineering marvel. When it opened in 1981, it became the world’s largest cable-stayed, fabric-roofed structure — dozens of open conical domes, an array of modern-day Pantheons hovering majestically over a vast expense of flat, desolate land.

The show comprises several interior galleries: AlBidayah (The Beginning) presents sacred objects. AlMadar (The Orbit) gathers significant collections from over thirty institutions in twenty countries. AlMuqtani (Homage) celebrates beautiful artifacts from The Al Thani Collection and The Furusiyya Art Foundation. Two special pavilions with historical treasures and contemporary artworks dedicated to Islam’s Holy Cities, Mecca and Medinah. Finally, there are open-air architecture and art installations under the terminal’s tent structure, the area designated by the Biennale as AlMidallah (The Canopy).

I visited the Biennale on its opening day in the company of Kaveh Dabiri, an Iranian-born associate architect at the Rotterdam office of OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture and the designer of the show’s scenography, both this year and in 2023. The architect told me that OMA’s objective was to provide consistency in the exhibition of objects and installations from all over the world in various scales and mediums. “We focused on using light material from the get-go,” he said. “Yet, we wanted our scenography to be architectural. It was not only about the display of objects. We wanted to present all of the objects, many of which are hundreds of years old, with a distinctly contemporary look. Lightness, translucency, and everything that’s in between were what we wanted to achieve here. Another important objective was to ensure that scenography was strong enough to elevate the experience of seeing objects.”

The architect’s scope of work included adding a series of low angled walls that partition the outdoor space under the canopy. They have been preserved since the first Biennale. This time, planters were added to soften the environment, and all interiors within several scattered boxy, almost windowless buildings designed by the Italian firm Giò Forma Architects were completely redone to reflect this year’s theme and artifacts. The first Biennale, under the title Awwal Bait (First House), focused on Islamic rituals and was designed as a series of interlocking rooms of various forms and sizes. This iteration features many spaces with blurry edges. “There is autonomy within buildings’ interiors lined in a choreographed path,” Dabiri pointed out. “There is more freedom in this edition. In the first Biennale, the felt cloth was draped to form rooms of multiple colors. Now, there is one color: white. Translucency is the key. There is also a change of moods at play — from lightness to darkness, from fluidity to rigidity, from softness to hardness, and from being lost to finding a sense of direction.” 

Dabiri, born in 1980, earned his Master of Architecture in Tehran. He followed the designs and writings of OMA co-founder Rem Koolhaas since his student days. He told me the famous Dutch architect was the key reason he continued his education in the Netherlands. Upon completing his postgraduate studies in urbanism at the Delft University of Technology in 2009, Dabiri was hired by OMA’s Rotterdam office. He moved to OMA’s branch in Qatar in 2014, and from 2015 to 2017 he collaborated on the designs of several exhibitions and buildings at the company’s Dubai location. Among them is Concrete Alserkal Avenue, a multi-purpose art venue that was completed in Dubai in 2017. The Dubai office was closed the same year, and the architect returned to Rotterdam. 

OMA’s close collaboration with the Biennale’s artistic curators started almost a year before the opening and included discussions and workshops at the architects’ Rotterdam office. Dabiri explained how “they gave us the curatorial concept, and we gave them the space that surprised them. They did not imagine it this way. We were not given a particular visual direction. That came from us.” It is worth adding that certain aspects of the result also surprised the architects” “When you work with textiles, it is not always predictable,” Dabiri clarified. "We went through lots of tests and played with lots of curves.”

Each space follows a distinctive design strategy: AlBidayah is soft, disorienting, and wonderfully hazy; after a few turns through irregularly shaped rooms and passages, it is easy to get lost, even if just for a moment. AlMadar is an archipelago of displays with singular and clustered light columns that dissipate toward the high ceiling. AlMuqtani celebrates ceremonial symmetry and architectural grander. Finally, at its center, the Mecca Pavilion has a glowing fabric-wrapped precisely cut petit enclosure that draws as much admiration for its refined, sleek look as the works of art it contains. Despite the variety of all these spaces, their strong relation is established through the use of white fabric of various transparency and porosity. From one pavilion to the next, the fabric ties everything together. There is a cohesiveness to the whole experience and a strong story that connects all the pieces. 

When I asked Dabiri about his favorite moments in the exhibition, he said he found it challenging to single out a specific gallery, emphasizing that its essence is best captured as a whole. However, he highlighted AlBidayah, describing it as “a continuous, non-edged, non-boundary space defined by a seamless translucent fabric stretched from floor to ceiling over an opaque felt cloth.” Together with the lighting, these walls change their look when seen from different angles and distances. The goal was to achieve a sense of haziness and serene space perceived to be seemingly unlimited. At a height of over 13 meters (42 feet), the designers certainly succeeded just that. Dabiri’s favorite part in this area is an ample space where four sides of black drapery (kiswa) that covered Ka’bah in 2024 now have a powerful presence. They are suspended overhead at slight angles to each other, displaying gold- and silver-embroidered inscriptions. Kiswa is replaced annually. Traditionally, the old cloth is divided and distributed among worshipers, but this year, without precedent, it was preserved. The sacred drapery is displayed outside Mecca for the first time in history.

My favorite space is also AlBidayah. I was most moved inside a cylindrical room with theatrical lighting and a slightly raised circular floor, effectively and effortlessly enhancing the senses. In its center, the space holds a single artwork, the Glass Qur’an, by British artist and architect Asif Khan. Particularly noteworthy is how the room is sculpted with transparent fabric, which appears like a mirage when first noticed from the adjacent galleries. Visitors’ roaming shadows and eavesdropping in these mesmerizing layered spaces are startling.  

As one explores the exhibition, what is a wall and what is not is not always clear. Some galleries are basic in form, while others are more complex. There are moments when you find yourself wrapped in full-height walls of stretched textiles. Unlike in the first Biennale, where the walls of the galleries remained visible, this time they are largely obscured, so visitors can become disoriented. Losing track of where you are is part of the experience; this limitless continuity is intentional. “There are no corners and no edges; everything is a continuation of everything else. There is a kind of suspense that is related to the vastness of the scale of the terminal,” said Dabiri, in summary. “There is this provocation that anything can happen under the canopy.”