For its second edition, in November 2022, the groundbreaking Noor Riyadh festival of light and contemporary art presents 190 monumental works signed by 130 artists from 40 countries and scattered in 40 emblematic locations throughout the city.

Curated by Hervé Mikaeloff, Dorothy Di Stefano and Jumana Ghouth and adviser Arnaud Morand, Noor Riyadh brings together Saudi and international artists such as Sara Abdu, Grimanesa Amorós, Gisela Colón, Douglas Gordon, winner of the Turner Prize, Alicja Kwade, Sabine Marcelis, Muhannad Shono, who represented Saudi Arabia at the Venice Biennale 2022, and French artists Daniel Buren, Jean-Michel Othoniel and Bertrand Lavier.

Entitled "We dream of new horizons", this second edition transforms the city into a dazzling nighttime gallery without walls, welcoming over 2.5 million visitors from international audiences to visitors from all over the globe.

Gathering a dedicated team, Manifesto manages the artist liaison, especially for Sara Abdu, but also the monitoring of artworks production and installation, their monitoring during the Festival and their dismantling, as well as supplier research for 82 of these monumental artworks in the public space. 

Manifesto already collaborated with Sara for the first edition of the Intermix Residency at Jax, with the Athr Gallery. 

To See the Infinite within me, 2022

Unpacking Sara Abdu’s earlier practice reveals an interplay between form and language, between our inner and outer worlds, the conscious and the unconscious, the material and the immaterial. The text, or language, married into the form in a type of semiosis; as the language began to inform the process of the work. We can see this in A Kingdom Where No One Dies, 2019, in which Abdu not only pushes her landscape forms into more sculptural modes – effecting a more phenomenological relation with the body – but informs the sculpture through the language itself. Through a process of translation, the language – a poetic verse – is first spoken, recorded, and its digital sonic forms are then cast in sand sculptures that submerge and rise from the floor of the space. This interplay between form and language in A Kingdom Where No One Dies reduces the spoken language to the rational, scientific building block of a soundwave, gesturing that it too could somehow have a transcendental effect.

In To See the Infinite within me, she uses the same method of translating poetry into a solid structure, only this time to create a meditative interactive piece that invites the viewer to explore some of the ways we navigate our inner territories, our inner reality. The work is inspired by the structure of labyrinths. An ancient tool used to draw people into meditation. Highly dependent on the orientation of the user, the work offers a space for contemplation and experiencing the passage of time.