Welcome to the club: the club of oil states that no longer trade in oil, but in tourism and art. A few years ago, Saudi Arabia presented its plans for the future. The program is called ‘Vision 2030’, unfolded by the reigning Crown Prince, Mohammad bin Salman. Vision 2030 should lead the way for the Saudis in times when oil production is coming to an end and other sources of income need to be tapped, such as tourism and the arts. Gulf countries such as Qatar, Dubai and Abu Dhabi had already come up with this idea before. Now also the largest country on the Arabian Peninsula followed. And they take it bigger than big right there.
Place of action: a 25 square kilometer stretch of desert, renamed Wadi AlFann, Valley of the Arts – an obvious reference to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, where the famous pharaoh tombs of Tutankhamun, among others, are located. Also in the Saudi valley of art are about a hundred royal tombs from the beginning of our era, some of which are spectacularly carved into the rock. The area was added to the World Heritage List by UNESCO in 2008.
The Saudi royal tombs were the first reason to exploit the area. Not only with attention to art and heritage. Travelers to the city of AlUla (about 45,000 inhabitants) will soon also be able to go ballooning, ride a horse on a 120-kilometer course, search for the Arabian leopard that is specially released in the area and spend the night in Jean Nouvel’s ‘eco-resort’ , the French star architect who had a complete rock cut out for this purpose.
Last week a corner of the veil was lifted. For example, in the valley of AlUla, in the northwest of the country, five permanent sculptures will be placed. For this, the English exhibition maker Iwona Blazwick, director of the Whitechapel Gallery in London, invited five artists. Among them are two old hands of (American) landscape art, Michael Heizer and James Turrell, plus the Saudi Manal AlDowayan and Ahmed Mater and the Hungarian-American Agnes Denes.
Everything should be ready by 2035. The Saudi government is aiming for two million visitors a year. The total cost: somewhere between 17 and 24 billion euros.
A contract was signed with France in 2018 for the cultural and logistical implementation of the programme. It led to the creation of the joint organization, AF AlUla, where the first two letters stand for Agence Française. Goal: to make the valley a ‘living museum’ with the estimated eight or nine museums to be built. In those museums, work by Anish Kapoor, Yayoi Kusama and the $450 million painting will soon be on display Salvator Mundic by Leonardo da Vinci. The French are also involved in setting up various educational centers and opening up the inaccessible area, where a ‘Smart City’ will eventually arise.
‘Scientific director’ of AF AlUla is the Frenchman Jean-François Charnier. He was previously responsible for furnishing and purchasing the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi. In conversation with de Volkskrantsix years ago, Charnier announced that Louvre Abu Dhabi is ‘an oasis’ [wordt] where people from all over the world come together’. In similar words, he told a video conference last year that the AlUla valley will also become a ‘door to the world’. ‘A barometer of social change.’
The five statues, which will be placed in the next two years, are not the first artistic activities in this area. Two years ago there was the outdoor exhibition Desert X and there were performances by Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, Chinese pianist Lang Lang and pop stars Mariah Carey and Rod Stewart. Despite all the criticism of the strict Saudi politics, the cultural offer can be justified, according to the supervisor of the art valley Amr AlMadani, because “culture has nothing to do with politics”, he said in a statement. The New York Times know.
That’s hard to believe. The Saudi government may grant women a driver’s license and allow more (art) tourists into the country, but at the beginning of this year 81 executions were carried out in one day. Saudi Arabia is still involved in the war in Yemen and everyone remembers the murder of columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
The use of art as an innocent-looking cover for social injustices, violence and oppression is seen as a form of money laundering, or ‘art laundering’, as The Art Newspaper it articulated. For exhibition maker Iwona Blazwick, however, her mission remains clear: ‘If you are interested in human rights, you are interested in change. (…) I see this in the systematic way in which art and culture in the [Saoedische] school system are processed.’
Also in Qatar
Saudi Arabia is not the only Arab country involved in landscape art. In the desert of Qatar, the American sculptor Richard Serra had four, now rusty, steel plates set in the sand over a length of one kilometer. Ten centimeters thick, about 15 meters high, exactly aligned with the surrounding plateau from which the valley in which they stand has been hollowed out. For those who are lost: GPS N250.31.019’E050.51.948′.