Noor Riyadh: What is that big star installation hanging over Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Tower right now?


Melissa Gronlund
  • English
  • Arabic

An enormous, nearly five-tonne, eight-point star has been suspended from Riyadh’s renowned Kingdom Tower, the 300-metre-tall building that dominates the city’s landscape.

Hanging 256 metres high in the sky, Star in Motion lights up on the hour in a dramatic display of light. The work's artist, Koert Vermeulen, says it simulates the birth and extinction of a star, condensed into a one-minute display.

The installation is part of the city's Noor Riyadh festival, a vast, multi-venue exhibition that is devoted to the artistic play with light, which runs until April 3. The event has brought in major international artists, such as Daniel Buren, Yayoi Kusama and Dan Flavin, as well as some 20 artists from Saudi Arabia's burgeoning art scene.

To see images from the Noor Riyadh festival, take a look through the gallery below:

Vermeulen got his start designing light shows for electronic music DJs in the 1990s. With a 22-person studio in Brussels, he now straddles the worlds of commercial lighting design and art, making displays for major events as well as creative projects.

Artist Koert Vermeulen got his start designing light shows for the techno scene of the 1990s. Courtesy Riyadh Art 2021
Artist Koert Vermeulen got his start designing light shows for the techno scene of the 1990s. Courtesy Riyadh Art 2021

This is his third work in Saudi Arabia; last year, he created the performance Leila: The Land of Imagination, via the use of light.

For this new project, he says: "The title of the show is Under One Sky, and I immediately knew that the light festival needed to have a star in the sky – and in the middle of the most iconic building.

"I've made a sun and a moon for other projects, so it made sense for me to make a star now. The sun [I made] is in India, the moon is in Belgium and the star is here.”

Far from being a static object overlooking the city, the star shimmers and glows, with reflective surfaces and moving light patterns. As well as its explosive birth and rebirth on the hour – like a rather more dramatic Big Ben – more subtle light effects occur every 15 minutes to emphasise how stars are actively changing in the sky.

The sun I made is in India, the moon is in Belgium and the star is here in Saudi Arabia

“I wanted people to have the patience to wait and watch it for a little while longer, to see how things change,” Vermeulen explains. “It becomes like a clock for the city.”

It was also a logistical feat. Vermeulen originally planned to make it nine metres across, but engineers warned him that a structure of that size would be too heavy to withstand the 160-kilometre-per-hour winds that can race through the desert city.

He and his team scaled it down to six metres, a size that still requires cables 80 millimetres in diameter – about the size of an upper arm – to hold it in place.

The star was produced in Belgium, and then dismantled and flown to Saudi Arabia. Its 317 parts were brought up the Kingdom Tower in a lift, and then carried by hand up the remaining two floors to a platform that had been constructed at the base of the tower's U-shaped void.

There, more than 200 metres above the city, the star was put back together. It was then winched up via rigging, and affixed to cables attached to the tower's sky bridge and other points in the gap.

The process was enough to impress even the lighting design veteran.

“Being more than 25 years in the entertainment industry, and seeing all those things that have been done before, I've never seen rigging like this,” he says. “Even performances for the Rolling Stones didn’t use that kind of rigging. I saw rigging elements that you only see in the shipping industry.”

The star is visible across Riyadh. In the day it resembles a necklace, hanging prettily down in the centre of the tower. At night, it becomes a dramatic feature of the city. The work will be up for the 17 days of the festival, and then dismantled and brought back down to Earth.

Noor Riyadh runs until Saturday, April 3.

More information is available at www.noorriyadh.sa

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The specs: 2019 Mercedes-Benz C200 Coupe


Price, base: Dh201,153
Engine: 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder
Transmission: Nine-speed automatic
Power: 204hp @ 5,800rpm
Torque: 300Nm @ 1,600rpm
Fuel economy, combined: 6.7L / 100km

Match info

What: Fifa Club World Cup play-off
Who: Al Ain v Team Wellington
Where: Hazza bin Zayed Stadium, Al Ain
When: Wednesday, kick off 7.30pm

Pakistan squad

Sarfraz (c), Zaman, Imam, Masood, Azam, Malik, Asif, Sohail, Shadab, Nawaz, Ashraf, Hasan, Amir, Junaid, Shinwari and Afridi

UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FINAL RECKONING

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Starring: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Simon Pegg

Rating: 4/5

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If you go

The flights 

Emirates flies from Dubai to Funchal via Lisbon, with a connecting flight with Air Portugal. Economy class returns cost from Dh3,845 return including taxes.

The trip

The WalkMe app can be downloaded from the usual sources. If you don’t fancy doing the trip yourself, then Explore  offers an eight-day levada trails tour from Dh3,050, not including flights.

The hotel

There isn’t another hotel anywhere in Madeira that matches the history and luxury of the Belmond Reid's Palace in Funchal. Doubles from Dh1,400 per night including taxes.

 

 

Sole survivors
  • Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
  • George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
  • Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
  • Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
How to invest in gold

Investors can tap into the gold price by purchasing physical jewellery, coins and even gold bars, but these need to be stored safely and possibly insured.

A cheaper and more straightforward way to benefit from gold price growth is to buy an exchange-traded fund (ETF).

Most advisers suggest sticking to “physical” ETFs. These hold actual gold bullion, bars and coins in a vault on investors’ behalf. Others do not hold gold but use derivatives to track the price instead, adding an extra layer of risk. The two biggest physical gold ETFs are SPDR Gold Trust and iShares Gold Trust.

Another way to invest in gold’s success is to buy gold mining stocks, but Mr Gravier says this brings added risks and can be more volatile. “They have a serious downside potential should the price consolidate.”

Mr Kyprianou says gold and gold miners are two different asset classes. “One is a commodity and the other is a company stock, which means they behave differently.”

Mining companies are a business, susceptible to other market forces, such as worker availability, health and safety, strikes, debt levels, and so on. “These have nothing to do with gold at all. It means that some companies will survive, others won’t.”

By contrast, when gold is mined, it just sits in a vault. “It doesn’t even rust, which means it retains its value,” Mr Kyprianou says.

You may already have exposure to gold miners in your portfolio, say, through an international ETF or actively managed mutual fund.

You could spread this risk with an actively managed fund that invests in a spread of gold miners, with the best known being BlackRock Gold & General. It is up an incredible 55 per cent over the past year, and 240 per cent over five years. As always, past performance is no guide to the future.

The specs

Engine: 1.5-litre turbo

Power: 181hp

Torque: 230Nm

Transmission: 6-speed automatic

Starting price: Dh79,000

On sale: Now

Hamilton’s 2017

Australia - 2nd; China - 1st; Bahrain - 2nd; Russia - 4th; Spain - 1st; Monaco - 7th; Canada - 1st; Azerbaijan - 5th; Austria - 4th; Britain - 1st; Hungary - 4th; Belgium - 1st; Italy - 1st; Singapore - 1st; Malaysia - 2nd; Japan - 1st; United States - 1st; Mexico - 9th