Donya Abdulhadi
Executive Director, Marketing, Communication and Strategic Partnerships
Diriyah Biennale Foundation
A slow-moving convoy is led through Wadi Hanifa towards the JAX District — a scene that merges heritage and natural landscape, pulsating with eager expression. Across the valley floor, vintage and new pickup trucks release their brakes and begin to slowly move after sunset, accompanied by camels and their handlers, clapping rhythmically, keeping movement paced and deliberate. The procession begins, as viewers watch in anticipation as it advances to where the Wadi ends and the district begins, culminating in its merging with hundreds of people in collective celebration, Saudi and non-Saudi communities alike, at the doors of the third edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale.
This performative scene, led by Saudi artist 7amdan, in the heart of Diriyah, known as the birthplace of the Saudi state, is not only symbolic, but diagnostic. To understand Saudi Arabia today — its acceleration, its ambition and its demographic shifts — one must see it as continuation, rather than sudden rupture.
Yet, discourse about transformation in the Arab world often fixates on politics and economic output. Against this backdrop, what is frequently overlooked is the cultural practices that make nation-scale change sustainable. The seemingly “sudden” revival of old cities, the creation of new ones, the inward migration of talent, policy reforms and the announcements of investments have been the primary scenes driving international understandings of Saudi Arabia’s transformation. Yet, the opportunity to more accurately read this change as a part of a much larger, rhythmic “procession,” is laid bare.
The Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, conceived by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation, artistically directed by Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed and titled In Interludes and Transitions, adopts procession as its opening metaphor. In Arab contexts, processions are often reduced to ritual display — pilgrims moving in unison, caravans crossing deserts, ceremonial marches through city streets. But procession has never been mere spectacle. It is infrastructure: the mechanism through which trade, belief, labor, and knowledge moved across terrain..
For centuries, the Arabian Peninsula has functioned as a corridor: between East Africa and South Asia, between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, between desert interiors and maritime routes. Trade, pilgrimage, seasonal migration, and the circulation of stories formed moving networks long before oil supported economic growth. Procession was not only physical movement; it has been the layering of skills, dialects, value systems, commercial and cultural practices across generations.
That pattern continues today, if in intensified form.
Today, Saudi Arabia is growing into one of the most demographically dynamic countries in the region. Expatriates constitute a ‘minority’ of more than 13 million residents — over 30% of the population — according to the Saudi General Authority for Statistics. These are not marginal, cosmetic figures; they reflect not temporary labor influx but a structural condition in which cross-border movement is foundational to the Kingdom’s social and economic architecture.
But migration is at times framed as sudden, episodic, even opportunistic — as individuals arriving to capitalize on growth or regulatory reform — when a more accurate reading is coordinated movement at scale: capital, labor, and expertise advancing in waves.
Consider the economic transformation underway. Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 has committed hundreds of billions of dollars toward diversification — tourism, logistics, renewable energy, entertainment, advanced manufacturing. The non-oil sector now contributes more than 50% of Saudi GDP. Crossing this threshold marks not diversification in theory, but a measurable shift in the engine of national growth from extractive dependence to multi-sector productivity. These figures signal structural and collective reorientation rather than incremental reform.
Procession in this region has in fact always been collective. Trade caravans moved in formation; pilgrimages operated in waves; ports thrived because of overlapping routes. Contemporary economic development follows a similar logic of embeddedness: partnerships with local entities, alignment with national transformation agendas, and participation in sectors are not bureaucratic formalities, but the modern equivalent of traveling in convoy.
Procession carries memory and implies sequencing. The region’s openness to global capital is not cultural amnesia; it is consistent with centuries of exchange. Riyadh’s rapid urban transformation is layered atop older routes. Reforms are phased, sector-specific, and often geographically concentrated. Nation-scale projects like Diriyah operate as critical nodes in a larger movement of urban and economic reconfiguration, designed to continue to attract long-term talent and capital. The labor statistics reinforce this. The volume of movement reflects systemic reliance on cross-border mobility instead of temporary flux.
Procession also implies visibility. In a caravan, each participant is seen, and reputation travels quickly. Trust, responsibility and credible contribution to collective goals matter. The region’s economic model, while globally integrated, remains relational at its core.
Like all changes, transformation is not frictionless. Regulatory frameworks evolve. Processions can re-route. Those looking to understand its transformation must recognize that the route is dynamic. Short-term extraction strategies — arrive, profit, exit — misread the scale of transformation underway.
The Biennale’s invocation of interludes and transitions offers a useful corrective to simplistic growth narratives. Saudi Arabia is not simplistically in acceleration; it moves through phases: consolidation, experimentation, recalibration. Periods of pause, regulatory and fiscal review and project restructuring might appear as reversals, but are actually interludes that prepare for the next transition.
Transformation here is neither chaotic nor accidental, but sequenced. It advances in steps, sometimes rapid, sometimes measured, but rarely isolated. Those who understand the rhythm of that movement participate in its momentum.
Procession, then, is not poetic flourish. It is a practical framework of reading change. In Saudi Arabia today, transformation moves in procession. The question is not whether it is occurring, but how attentively one reads its cadence and moves within it.
