brief
Noor Riyadh is a city-wide public art festival that explores how light-based practice can transform urban space and reshape how residents and visitors experience the city. The 2025 edition, held under the theme In the Blink of an Eye, examined how light reflects a city in constant motion, drawing attention to the speed of transformation taking place in Riyadh.
For our third collaboration with the festival, Alserkal Advisory was invited to expand and refine public programming as a key mode of engagement. The aim was to introduce new ways for audiences to connect with the artworks distributed across the city, while also creating direct points of exchange between visitors and participating artists.
RESPONSE
Encounter through public programming
Alongside Noor Riyadh’s city-scale presentation of light-based installations, Alserkal Advisory developed a programme of artist-led talks, a 10-week apprenticeship programme, workshops, tours and a family activity booklet that functioned as a connective layer between artistic practice and public experience.
We approached community engagement as shared authorship for a city in motion. We treated the artworks and curatorial text as primary sources, translating them across formats and publics, in Arabic and English, so different ages and levels of art awareness could enter while the through-line to the works and theme stayed clear.
By foregrounding process as much as presentation, the approach supported an accessible yet layered audience journey. Public programming became a means of slowing down engagement, enabling visitors to consider how light operates across material, spatial, and conceptual registers, and how each installation responds to its immediate surroundings.
The programme recast one-way formats as dialogue: tours became conversations, talks became debates with live input, workshops became working studios, and the apprenticeship became a sustained learning community.
Creating spaces for shared exploration
Choreography Workshop - Bilal Allaf
Painting with Time - Artur Webber
MythOS - Faris Attieh
Space and Light - Bricklab
Community building for Noor Riyadh through programmes
