brief
Returning to the festival team with an expanded scope in 2023, Alserkal Advisory was asked to look beyond just the talks and workshops to also develop family activities and guided tours. The goal was to help inspire young arts audiences in the Kingdom and to bolster Riyadh Art’s vision to nurture and ignite a creative economy.
RESPONSE
The Advisory team revisited the festival’s curatorial theme—’The Bright Side of the Desert Moon’—to define an approach to the programme’s content and give audiences a reason to connect with the thematic. Focusing on how light is observed and experienced, honouring the perspective of the viewer and the act of collective viewing, the programme emulated the construct of a prism—a transparent object of multiple and differently angled planes—splitting the programme into three strands: reflection, refraction, and dispersion.
In addition to crafting a curatorial approach that resonated with participants and viewers, we handled operational oversight, dedicated artist-liaison, and coordinated with the on-site event management teams to deliver the artists’ set-up including tech, rehearsals and call sheet, as well as audience management.
Over 17 days, we executed a comprehensive programme of 21 talks, 9 types of workshops with over 70 sessions, and more than 300 family activity sessions, ultimately reaching more than 26,000 people, including children.
