Noor Riyadh 2025 charts the city’s shifting landscape through light and memory

The fifth year of the global art event displays new works across the Saudi capital, highlighting its evolving artistic landscape

Noor Riyadh, an annual light festival held in the Saudi capital, is running until December 6. Reuters

Lighting up sites across the Saudi capital, Noor Riyadh returns for its fifth year, once again transforming the city into a vibrant visual showcase of light, beauty and creativity.

Since its launch in 2021, the world’s largest light-art festival has welcomed more than nine million visitors, presenting about 450 works by more than 365 artists. It reflects the government’s aim to make Riyadh an international centre for art and culture – a public gallery without walls.

Noor Riyadh 2025 continues that momentum with 60 installations by leading Saudi and international artists, including 35 new commissions. This year, however, the focus turns inward, reflecting on the rapid pace of change the capital has experienced in recent years.

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The theme – In the Blink of an Eye – is shaped by curators Li Zhenhua, Sara Al Mutlaq and Mami Kataoka, and brings together the city’s historic core and its expanding metro system, symbolising the kingdom’s embrace of heritage, technology and progress.

Artist Fatma Abdulhadi's installation Keep Your Eyes on the Light: Into Another Garden is on display at the festival. Getty Images

“Every year, this event grows more and more,” Nouf Al Moneef, director of Noor Riyadh, tells The National. “The transition that is happening in our capital city is beautiful: all the new projects; all the new architecture; all the new things that are happening. In the blink of an eye, Riyadh has transformed. We are connecting with different cultures and helping each other. Every artist has his own input in how he wanted to show the theme.”

“Light as an artistic medium has always fascinated me,” says Kataoka. “It is both material and metaphor; something we can see, but also something that reveals what we cannot see. As part of our curatorial theme for this year’s festival, it also becomes a language of connection between the past and the future.”

The festival unfolds as a journey of light across the city, spanning key heritage and contemporary sites. Its three main hubs are the King Abdulaziz Historical Centre, the historic Qasr Al Hokm district and the STC Metro Station, alongside satellite locations including the KAFD Metro Station, Al Faisaliah Tower and JAX District.

Visitors dance in front of the installation In Light, Together by the artist Alexandra Gelis. Getty Images

In the gardens surrounding the KAHC, Saudi visual artist Khalid Zahid’s Skeleton of the Glorious draws inspiration from Al-Masmak Fort, the adobe and clay citadel that once protected old Riyadh. Zahid reimagines that protective presence as a skeletal structure – a metaphor for stability, strength and perseverance.

The hollow, wireframe-like work is lit from within, causing its exterior to dissolve into shadow and drawing attention to the inner form: a reminder that true strength lies beneath the surface.

“If you look at a skeleton, it protects all the organs within the body,” Zahid says. “So I imagined, if I take an X-ray of Al-Masmak, you will find a skeleton that looks like this. The base of Saudi Arabia is a very strong skeleton and the light is the X-ray – a powerful light to show that inner strength.”

Noor Riyadh 2025 is being held under the theme In The Blink of an Eye. Reuters

Over in Qasr Al Hokm, Benzene Float I by Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri transforms molecular petrochemistry into monumental forms. Part of a continuing series, the iridescent fibreglass sculptures draw on the “space-filling models” scientists use to depict petrochemical compounds. Al Qadiri’s works bridge a futurist vision of the Gulf with the legacies of resource extraction, ecological and cultural.

“I have been obsessed with the topic of oil for many years,” she says. “[This is a] reimagining of how scientists draw petrochemicals. They look like little balloons. So I decided to make inflatable works based on petrochemical substances that we use every day – benzene, propane, naphthalene – that we hear about but never see because they are invisible.

“The colours reference the iridescence of oil, but also the region’s pre-oil pearl industry. My theory – as an artist – is that the colour of pearls transformed into the colour of oil, and will transform into something else in the future. This iridescence is actually the colour of history and the future.”

Noor Riyadh has presented about 450 works by more than 365 artists since its inception in 2021. Getty Images

Outside the STC Metro Station, Saudi artist Saad Al Howede presents Memory Melting, a trio of large illuminated installations shaped like oversized emojis. Their surfaces are embedded with children’s toys collected from around the world and fused into constellations of shared experience, contrasting the tactile, open-ended play of the past with the virtual, pre-programmed worlds that define childhood today.

“We have changed our way of thinking about games,” Al Howede says. “We have shifted from a situation where children play in a park with each other to a situation where a child is alone in a room, interacting virtually with people from all over the world. Now, they show their feelings through emojis. So how did the emotions change? Were these emotions real?

“Children everywhere – whether in Saudi Arabia or the United States – are children,” he adds. “They don’t have an ideology. They just want to play and learn from playing games. The feelings of those children – these emojis – are understood worldwide, all united in one shape.”

Noor Riyadh runs till December 6