Home » Saudi Arabia Travel News » AlUla Transforms Its Ancient Desert Landscape into a Month-Long Celebration of Contemporary Art, Design and Performance in 2026 Published on
December 14, 2025AlUla transforms its ancient desert landscape into a living cultural terrain in 2026, as the AlUla Arts Festival returns for a month-long celebration of contemporary art, design and performance. Set among towering sandstone formations, historic settlements and evolving cultural districts, the fifth edition unfolds not as a temporary event but as an experience deeply rooted in place. From expansive desert installations and museum-scale exhibitions to design-led programmes, performances and community-driven encounters, the festival invites visitors to move through art shaped by land, time and shared memory, positioning AlUla as a destination where contemporary creativity exists in continuous dialogue with one of the world’s oldest inhabited landscapes.What began five years ago as an emerging arts initiative has matured into a month-long programme that spans visual art, design, performance, film and music. The festival extends across open desert terrain and into the streets of AlJadidah Arts District, favouring immersion over enclosure. Visitors are encouraged to walk, wander and pause, encountering art through movement and proximity rather than fixed routes, echoing AlUla’s historic role as a site of passage and exchange.Advertisement A defining feature of the programme is the fourth edition of Desert X AlUla, opening on January 16 and continuing through February 28. Ten newly commissioned works are installed directly within the desert, positioned across vast distances that require time and travel to experience fully. Shaped by the theme Space Without Measure, the exhibition resists conventional viewing. Instead, it invites reflection on scale, silence and perception, allowing the land itself to dictate pace and perspective.The participating voices respond to AlUla’s monumental geology and its long history as a cultural crossroads. Sound, shadow, orientation and distance become central elements of the artworks, which avoid overt narratives in favour of sensory engagement. The desert operates as more than a backdrop, influencing how each work is revealed through light, weather and movement. This close relationship between art and environment continues to define Desert X AlUla as one of the region’s most ambitious land-based art platforms.The festival also marks an important step toward institutional presence with the opening of Arduna on February 1, part of the pre-opening programme for AlUla’s future contemporary art museum. Translating to “our land,” the exhibition explores evolving relationships between humanity and nature through more than 80 works from Saudi Arabia, the region and international collections. Themes of land use, memory, preservation and responsibility run througho …
