DUBAI: Diriyah Art Futures, an asset of Saudi Arabia’s Museums Commission under the Ministry of Culture, on Tuesday announced the lineup for “Continuum 26,” an exhibition showcasing the creative output of participants in its second Emerging New Media Artists Program.
Running from Sept. 3 to Nov. 7 in Diriyah, Riyadh, “Continuum 26” is the second edition of the annual series, which highlights innovative voices shaping the future of new media and digital art in the region and beyond.
The exhibition features major new works developed by participating artists during a year-long educational program at DAF, with support from its education, production, and exhibition departments.
Under the mentorship of acclaimed mentor-artists Louis-Philippe Demers and Rick Treweek, participants explored creative practices spanning immersive and multimedia installations, light, sound, moving image, virtual reality, mixed reality and artificial intelligence-generated projects.
The title “Continuum” reflects the evolving nature of creative inquiry at the heart of the Emerging New Media Artists program.
It describes a dynamic process through which different artistic trajectories converge around shared themes, while reflecting the artists’ development and the fluid boundaries between reality and artificial reality.
The exhibition has four thematic pillars. There is “Memory as a living process, exploring personal, collective, environmental and cultural remembering,” and “Systems of power and optimization, examining technology as an extension of human decisions, desires and control.”
The other two pillars are “The body, perception, and presence, focusing on embodiment, interspecies relationships and immersive sensory environments,” and “Repetition, rhythm, and collective experience, exploring automated systems, labor and human endurance.”
As the first New Media Arts center in the Middle East and North Africa, DAF focuses on advancing interdisciplinary creative practice at the intersection of art, science and technology. The exhibition underscores its efforts to bring together arts, research and education to empower emerging artists.
