While the first Diriyah Biennale in 2021 took place in Riyadh and focused on Contemporary Arts, the upcoming Biennale will migrate to Jeddah and inaugurate the first-ever Islamic Arts Biennale. This has provoked us to ponder the inter-relationships between Islamic and contemporary art.

We will invite Arwa Ali from Diriyah Biennale Foundation to speak with Sumayya Vally, the Curator of the Islamic Arts Biennale and Founder of the architectural studio Counterspace, to discuss not the seeming deviation between the two events, but their joint origins.