Six must-see artworks at the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale in Saudi Arabia

The first Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale opened this month just outside of Riyadh. A total of 63 artists are included in the inaugural exhibition Feeling the Stones, which considers how a country like Saudi Arabia, with its major societal changes, can chart its future.

Curated by Philip Tinari, director and chief executive of UCCA Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing, the show includes old and never-before-seen works, with about half of the presentations commissioned for the biennale.

Equal parts captivating and memorable, Wekua’s melancholic, at times apocalyptic, video work oscillates between visions of dreams, nightmares and glimpses of a dystopian world.

Paired with a haunting track thundering and slicing metallic sounds, the five-minute film is at its most striking when it depicts a burning palm tree. As flames swallow up its fronds, the tree appears to be shrieking over a glistening piano tune.

While Wekua’s visuals may seem surreal at first, one begins to realise how much they mirror "real life" – particularly scenes from wild fires that have ravaged the US West Coast this year. The weeping palm, alight and helpless, symbolises the world as it is today.

In this moving two-channel installation, the artists are presenting footage shot in the UAE during the 1990s. Much of the material was recorded by Chai’s father, a Chinese worker who lived in the Middle East for seven years and recorded his experiences with a videocassette recorder.

We hear Chinese pop music, recitations of poetry and musings by the main subject, and, in one of the most human moments, a conversation between father and daughter about their time apart.

Several things unfold in this near-hour-long work, not in the least glimpses of a specific time in history when globalisation in the Far East and Middle East were merging, but perhaps what is most valuable is the perspective from which this history is told – a worker entering a new culture, brought to a distant land for the prospect of greater income. In the Gulf, it is a story that repeats itself time and again.

1993-1994 is one of the subtler works in the biennale, but nonetheless significant for its portrait of labour and sacrifice that exists in a truth outside of national myths.