Islamic Arts Biennale
23.01 - 23.05.2023

Johannesburg-based architect, researcher and founder of Counterspace, Sumayya Vally, is the Aritistic Director of the inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale, which opened at the start of the year in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and is organised by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation. We spoke to her about honouring tradition, fostering community and “putting forth an art and an architectural future that’s different.”

To start, can you tell us a little bit about your background as a curator? 

I am, and practice as – first and foremost – an architect. In this project, in my role as Artistic Director, I have brought my thinking as an architect to the project – in how I have thought through the theme, Awwal Bait – as a reflection on constructions of belonging; and in the conception of the narrative and subsequent spaces – as atmospheres and spaces for gathering. My practice is rooted in finding design form and artistic expression from our identities, which the Islamic Arts Biennale directly speaks to. Curation is pedagogical and research-driven and my practice has always been invested in that.

Islamic Arts Biennale, 2023. Photo by Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy of the Diriyah Biennale Foundation.

You have pointed out that the term “Islamic Arts” is largely an orientalist one, defined by Europeans in the nineteenth century. In what ways does this biennale attempt to redefine the genre?

Thank you for this question, because I feel deeply that a redefinition of Islamic art is urgent and important. We could even argue that the biennale exists to unearth different definitions of Islamic art. They are plural, diverse and resonant with our practices and experiences of being of the Muslim world. Rather than being determined by aesthetics, geometries, geographies, here we are celebrating Islamic arts that take inspiration from the source: philosophies, rituals and practices, drawing on the knowledge, wisdom and experience of rituals in the faith. 

It is important that we take this arena and title “Islamic Arts” on and that we work with it. That we believe deeply and we acknowledge that Islamic faith, Islamic practice and Islamic tradition can and should be making a creative contribution to the world.

Existing definitions of Islamic art often focus on style, tradition, geography, pattern, and geometry. The ambition of the Biennale is to build on and challenge these criteria, expanding on the existing canon of Islamic art, and to question the narrative, museological, and artistic practices of this time. Islamic artworks may have surface similarities, but what really unites them is inherent in how they are made, used and understood.

When we identify great artworks as Islamic, we are simultaneously honouring historical traditions by keeping them alive, and contemporary practices by giving them a history. It is important to situate contemporary work in the historical narrative because it is only in context that things can belong.

The works in the biennale are experiential. They put forth an entirely different definition for Islamic Art: rooted in the experiential, the oral, the aural, our ritual practices and the ingredients and infrastructures of gathering and community. In the broader context of the project of the museum as we know it, which is deeply in crisis and looking for relevance, this project puts forward worlds that are resonant with our lives and come from different bodies of knowledge that can push forth the future of museum and creative practice differently. 

Islamic Arts Biennale, 2023. Photo by Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy of the Diriyah Biennale Foundation.

As a trained architect, it must have been a fun challenge to modify the Western Hajj Terminal at Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz International Airport for exhibition purposes. Can you tell us more about this? 

When I first visited the Hajj Terminal on pilgrimage in 2004, I was 14 years old, and the experience remained with me as a vivid memory of relatability and wonder. I returned in 2021, and felt this sensation return after many years, realising what a fertile place of imagination and long-standing connection it was.

For billions of Muslims across the centuries, Makkah has been a place formed continuously through our rituals and dreams. The physical site for the Biennale, the Hajj Terminal, designed as a contemporary gateway to Makkah, is located in the historic city of migration, Jeddah. It is imbued with significance for generations of Muslims the world over, witnessing their moment of arrival in the Kingdom. 

Situated within the historic Hajj terminal in Jeddah (the southern gate of the haramayn), a monumental site layered with meaning, memory and significance for Muslims for its position as the gateway to the pilgrimage, the biennale recognises this site as a home for the rest of the world, making it one of the most hybrid sites of cultural exchange on earth.

The scenography of the site, implemented by OMA, was particularly exciting for me to direct, because I was intent on producing scenography that draws on worlds from our rituals. The spaces in the Qiblah theme move from darkness into light through a series of spaces inspired from the sounds and atmospheres of our rituals. Outside, in the Hijrah theme, we experience a series of spaces for communing and gathering in the landscape – drawing on the energy of the Hajj terminal as a city of gathering for the world. Not white cube scenography, but really working with developing atmospheres related to rituals and spaces in the landscape for communing and gathering. 

Islamic Arts Biennale, 2023. Photo by Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy of the Diriyah Biennale Foundation.

The exhibition features 280 works of historical objects and artefacts with 60 newly commissioned contemporary artworks. Are there any works in particular that you feel are speaking to each other across time? 

The Ka‘bah’s holiness is defined by the acts of devotion to Allah that have been centred on it across time. Nasser Al Salem’s project for the Biennale reflects on this evolving ritual heritage. An installation that is also a contribution to the archive of knowledge about the building, the work takes for its source material verbal accounts across a long time period, and pays attention to the architectural details described. Weaving his calligraphic practice with his architectural training, he uses the words themselves to demarcate the boundary of the Ka‘bah and narrate minor shifts in its form. Through them, we understand that parts of the Ka‘bah have remained unchanged while others underwent a series of alterations that hold a significance only made visible in their reformulation.

Instead of its preservation being focused on exact reconstructions over time, petrified and static, we understand that the building’s sacrality and durability are in fact ensured through continuous acts of care or ibadah. These are epitomised by the tradition of remaking the kiswah (the Kaaba covering) and the yearly labours of love and craft embodied therein. This practice of dynamic preservation—through the oral and bodily passing down of tradition, and through ritual practice and use — is an offering from Islamic cultural practice.

Each time we stand up in prayer to face the Ka‘bah, we are connected across worldly time and divine dimensions with beings past, present, and future who do the same, through vectors and invisible lines which connect us to our Awwal Bait, the first house, in a continual construction of spiritual belonging. 

Igshaan Adams, Salat Aljamaeat Min Bonteheuwel (a communal prayer from Bonteheuwel), 2023. Courtesy of the Diriyah Biennale Foundation.

That said, almost all the works exhibited in this biennale blur time, giving contemporary practices a lineage, while giving historic objects a future. A number of the artists here work with embodying living archive through their collaborations, for example, Igshaan Adams, whose source material is used prayer mats that have been passed down over generations within his community in Bonteheuwel in Cape Town. Together with a group of women from the same community, he worked with the imprints of the markings, and of the bodies, to weave these tapestries as an homage to these bodies who have come together through their faith, against apartheid, in very difficult conditions over generations. 

Then, Haroon Gunn-Salie’s Amongst Men cites the funeral procession of his namesake, Apartheid martyr and Muslim cleric, Imam Abdullah Haron, who was killed by Apartheid police in 1969. He spent a lot of time in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which influenced his ethos, his way of being, and his politics. His funeral was attended by forty thousand mourners. This work is very prescient because the trial of Imam Haron is currently happening in South Africa to prosecute his killers. And in this work, we see these hats, which are a reflection of a fraction of the people who gathered to pay their respects and say their last goodbye. And we hear an audio piece with narrations from Imam’s daughters and poetry about his life and the impact that he had on his community.

Haroon Gunn-Salie, Amongst Men, 2023. Courtesy of the Diriyah Biennale Foundation.

Many of the works also interrogated this idea of preservation in a living and breathing way. I believe as an architect, that can offer something for the future of architecture. I also believe that it can certainly offer something for the future of artistic practice.

For example, the piece by Syn Architects, Anywhere Can Be a Place of Worship, specifically focused on nesting architecture and architecture from the Arab region and what it can offer for the future, in terms of how we think about sustainable futures and ecologies, and how we think about how we preserve heritage and lived practices. 

Inspired by the Prophet’s (PBUH) first space of prayer, which was not anything ornate or the image that we have of mosques today. It really was created with palm fronds and was integrated and disappeared entirely into the ground; it touched the earth lightly. It was a space that was made by rituals of community and by people coming together. And that, for me, is an architecture that’s different. It’s putting forth an art and an architectural future that’s different. 

It’d be remiss of me not to mention Sun Path, Rajab to Shawwal 1444 by Civil Architecture. Traditionally, mosque courtyards featured a sundial that indicated the time of the five daily prayers, and mosques served as spaces where the general public could align their sense of time with the movement of the heavenly bodies. Inspired by the architecture of the Hajj Terminal, Civil Architecture have reimagined the sundial. The round opening (oculus) in each unit of the terminal’s canopy, which limits the amount of direct sunlight passing into the space below, acts as an inverted sundial. The installation in turn tracks the movement of a beam of sunlight rather than a cast shadow. This sunbeam passes over lines on the ground corresponding to the hours, months, and seasons, as well as sculptural objects that indicate significant moments in Islamic history and the hijri calendar, and events in the Biennale’s public program. Our sense of the sun’s movement and the colour of the sky provide a general indication of the hour, in contrast to the abstract notion of time created by digital clocks, while the installation connects the space of the Biennale to events in the world beyond.

Civil Architecture, Sun Path, Rajab to Shawwal 1444, 2023. Photo by Ali Ismail Karimi.