JEDDAH — Saudi Arabia made history last month with the staging of the first-ever Islamic Arts Biennale. Prominent artists, collectors and art specialists from the Middle East and international art scenes gathered under the expansive, tent-like canopies of the iconic Western Hajj Terminal at the King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah for the inauguration — the same place that pilgrims from around the world gather to attend hajj, their pilgrimage to Mecca. 

The exhibition (January 23-April 23), displays over 280 works of Islamic historical objects — including 239 from Saudi Arabia and 15 that have never been exhibited before — within an 80,000-square-meter space alongside 60 new commissioned works of contemporary art by 42 international artists and collectives, among which 18 are from Saudi Arabia. The exhibition brings Islamic art home to the birthplace of Islam. Its staging in Jeddah, close to Mecca, is also synonymous with its theme, “Awwal Bait," which means “first house” in Arabic. The theme evokes the symbolic unity of the Holy Kaaba, the building at the center of the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, Islam’s most important mosque.  

Summaya Vally, a South African architect and artistic director of the biennale, curated the exhibition alongside a host of specialists, including prominent Saudi scholar and archaeologist Saad Alrashid; Omniya Abdel Barr, an Egyptian architect and Barakat Trust Fellow at the V&A; and Julian Raby, director emeritus of the National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. 

The Islamic Arts Biennale is historical in many ways. “It is a temporary home, an entirely new physical setting in this context of the Muslim pilgrim’s journey, in which to invite artists and audiences to reflect on ritual, the sacred, the personal and the communal,” said Vally in a statement. She stressed to Al-Monitor how Islamic art has rarely been displayed on such a global platform. The last major exhibition of Islamic art was held in 1976 in London. The Islamic Arts Biennale, she says, sheds light on Islamic art and culture from the “Muslim perspective from our part of the world.”