A stunning shroud of darkness greets guests to the primary Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Within the first gallery, amidst the blackness are the chant-like sounds of American-Lebanese media artist Joseph Namy’s Cosmic Breath, during which recorded prayers from numerous nations are performed powerfully in unison. Throughout the room are Saudi artist Nora Alissa’s haunting black-and-white pictures, organized in a triptych. Titled Epiphamania: The First Gentle, the evocative footage depict pilgrims across the sacred Kaaba, the constructing on the centre of Islam’s most essential mosque, Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, which Alissa photographed from beneath her abaya. Only a few steps away is a sequence of historic astrolabes courting to the seventeenth century. They function a reminder of the contributions Islamic philosophers have made to discoveries in astronomy, geometry, and arithmetic for hundreds of years.

Underneath the theme of ‘Awwal Bait’, which implies ‘first home’ in Arabic, these works – conventional and up to date displayed in collectively within the birthplace of Islam – act as a precursor for the remainder of the exhibition which, because the customer strikes from darkness to gentle, balances its 280 works of Islamic historic objects and artefacts with 60 newly commissioned up to date artworks. The impact is without delay ritualistic, meditative, and mystical.

Staged on the Western Hajj Terminal on the metropolis’s King Abdulaziz Worldwide Airport, used throughout the hajj  for once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimages to Mecca, the world’s first Islamic arts biennale provides a cultural and metaphysical exploration of the creative heritage of Islam. 

The primary Islamic Arts Biennale: historical past within the making