Noor Riyadh 2025: Light, Memory and the Rhythm of a Changing City

On late November evenings, Riyadh moves with a pace that feels both familiar and entirely new. Metro lines sweep through stations lit like architecture of the future, historic districts stay alive long after sunset, and the city’s rhythm – once defined by silence and long stretches of stillness – now unfolds in visible layers. This year, that rhythm becomes light. Noor Riyadh turns the Saudi capital into an open – air map of movement, memory and transformation.

Running from 20 November to 6 December, the fifth edition of the festival brings together 60 artworks by 59 artists from 24 countries, including more than 35 new commissions. Organized by Riyadh Art under the Royal Commission for Riyadh City (RCRC), Noor Riyadh positions itself not as a single destination but as a constellation of experiences spread across six carefully chosen locations – from the historic core to the futuristic curves of Zaha Hadid’s KAFD Metro Station.

Even in a city evolving at extraordinary speed, Noor Riyadh does not compete with change; it reveals it.

An this year’s theme – In the Blink of an Eye – captures exactly that: a city where history and modernity don’t collide, but move alongside each other with surprising ease.

Across its five editions, Noor Riyadh has welcomed millions of visitors, presenting hundreds of artworks that trace the evolution of Saudi society through light, scale and public space. This year’s curatorial trio – Mami Kataoka, Sara Almutlaq and Li Zhenhua – builds on the legacy with a program rooted in observation: of time, of rhythm, of daily life.

Li Zhenhua, a long – standing figure in media art and experimental film, speaks of Riyadh as a place he recognized instantly – not from travel, but from memory. ‘In the nineties in China, cities shifted overnight. You’d walk through a demolished block one morning and see a tower rising the next. When I arrived in Riyadh, that feeling return – the speed, the light, the atmosphere’.

Before choosing artworks, he spent days walking each location, sometimes twice a day, nothing how light behaved in the afternoon heat, how crowds moved through the metro, how the old city breathed at night.

‘If you don’t understand the rhythm of a place, you can’t curate for it’, he says. ‘The artwork must meet the city where it already lives.’

This year’s six festival sites form a portrait of Riyadh as it stands today.

In Qasr Al Hokm and the King Abdulaziz Historical Center, installations interact with adobe facades, Najdi geometry, palm – lined squares and long – held memories. At the King Abdulaziz Historical Center, works resonate with Saudi social history – from Safeya Binzagr’s documentary paintings of wedding customs to new commissions built around archives and oral narratives.

At the KAFD Metro Station, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, and the STC Metro Station, by Gerber Architekten, the festival shifts toward momentum. Facades turn into fields of colour, algorithms translate complex data into immersive images, and commuters become part of the artwork simply by passing through.

At Al Faisalih Tower, beams of light and mapped animations turn one of the city’s most recognizable silhouettes into a quit astronomical instrument. And in JAX District, the city’s contemporary art hub, the festival returns to experimentation: research – driven works, interdisciplinary collaborations, and installations that blur the boundary between art and science.

Among the works, certain pieces define this year’s emotional and conceptual tone.

Saad Al Howede’s Memory Melting – a cluster of luminous spheres made from melted toys collected from families across the globe – examines childhood in an age where screens shape imagination. ‘The real story of the child is disappearing’, he says. The toys, fused together, form a surface where fragments of memory remain alive in colour and shape.

Safeya Binzagr’s Scenes of a Matrimony brings three of her celebrated paintings to life as one continuous narrative of a traditional Hijazi wedding – a rare moment where historical imagery enters the public sphere with renewed intimacy.

Shinji Ohmaki’s Liminal Air Space – Time fills a historic courtyard with thousands of silk threads suspended in darkness – a sculpture of air and movement that shifts with the slights change in temperature or presence.

Loris Cecchini’s Blaublobbing attaches translucent, bubble – like sculptural forms to existing streetlights, reshaping familiar architecture through gentle luminosity.

Guillaume Cousin’s Le Silence des Particules uses bursts of mist to create perfect, ephemeral rings that float and dissolve in a single beam of light – a study in the fragility of the present moment.

Ivana Franke’s Centre, installed in STC Metro Station, transforms a transparent cube into a spatial experiment made of hundreds of monofilament lines, drawing on her long – standing collaborations with neuroscientists.

Across these works – and many others – the city becomes the final collaborator.

But Noor Riyadh is not defined only by architecture, scale or technology.

It is defined by the people who walk through it.

One of the festival’s most distinct qualities is how naturally is gathers every generation into a shared experience. Children stop in front of installations with a kind of astonishment only light can trigger – chasing shadows, colours, reflections. Families walk together long after the usual rhythm of the evening has ended, turning an ordinary night into a quiet celebration of being outside and discovering the city anew. Students linger between metro stations, taking detours to see what has changed since last year, while long – time residents observe how seamlessly art enters their daily routines.

Noor Riyadh doesn’t ask people to plan or prepare; it simply meets them where they already are – in streets, courtyards, plazas and stations – making the city feel open, generous and unexpectedly intimate.

And that may be its most defining achievement.

In the end, Noor Riyadh is not simply an art festival – it is an experience that exists only here, shaped by a city that changes at a pace few places can match. It is a moment that invites you to look differently, walk differently, and feel the rhythm of Riyadh in a way that can happen only once, and only in this place.