Diriyah Art Futures launched CONTINUUM ’26 on Thursday in Diriyah, opening the second edition of the exhibition with works by 16 emerging artists and two mentors from its year-long Emerging New Media Artists Program. The show is being presented by Diriyah Art Futures, described as the first center for New Media Arts in the Middle East and North Africa. The state’s cultural apparatus is doing what it does best here: funding, curating, branding, and calling it the future.
The Museum Sector Gets Its Briefing
At the launch, CEO of the Museums Commission Eng. Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Hammad said: “Programs like the Emerging New Media Artists Program represent the long-term, deliberate investment needed to shape the future of the Kingdom's museum sector.
“By providing our artists with world-class facilities, mentorship, and the dedicated time to refine their craft, we are fueling innovation and sparking vital cultural conversations. CONTINUUM 26 brings a full year of that dedication into the public eye.”
That’s the official script. Long-term investment. World-class facilities. Cultural conversations. The language is polished enough to hide the machinery underneath, but not so polished that it stops being a machine. The exhibition is part of a program developed in collaboration with Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in France, and it gives emerging artists access to cutting-edge professional equipment, a production budget and multidisciplinary learning opportunities. The public gets the finished product. The institution keeps the pipeline.
Art, AI, and the Managed Future
Visitors saw immersive and multimedia installations, light, sound, moving image, virtual reality, mixed reality and AI-generated projects. The exhibition was curated by Irini Papadimitriou and Bushra Alghamdi, Assistant Curator, and explores memory, identity, place, belonging, repetition and interspecies relationships. The works were developed under the mentorship of Louis-Philippe Demers and Rick Treweek and examine the boundaries between the real and the artificial, human and artificial intelligence, and the organic and synthetic.
The opening program began with a panel conversation between exhibition artists Noel Apitta, Njood Albwardi, Badriya Alsalem and Harpreet Sareen, in conversation with Bushra Alghamdi about the ideas behind their works in CONTINUUM '26. The artists discussed the exhibition's themes, including the power of artificial intelligence, memory and time, and embodied perception, and described how each of them navigated their creative process and what questions drove them. The questions are real enough. The setting is managed.
The exhibition is open to the public at Diriyah Art Futures and runs until November 7. A public program of workshops, talks and other activities spans AI, VR, digital photography and more. Over the opening weekend, artists will discuss the ideas and processes behind their works with visitors. The institution invites participation, but on its terms, in its space, under its brand, with its budget.
The Grant-Funded Future Arrives Prepackaged
CONTINUUM ’26 is the second installment in a series of exhibitions at DAF. The Emerging New Media Artists Program was developed in collaboration with Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in France, and the whole setup depends on access to professional equipment, mentorship and a production budget. That’s the model: culture routed through institutions, creativity filtered through commissions, and public conversation packaged as programming.
The exhibition’s themes — memory, identity, belonging, place, repetition, interspecies relationships, the real and the artificial — are broad enough to hold a lot of ambition. They’re also safely housed inside a state-backed cultural project that can afford to call itself experimental while remaining firmly inside the museum sector’s long-term plan. The artists get time and tools. The institution gets legitimacy. The public gets a carefully staged encounter with the future, one installation at a time.
The show’s second edition arrives with all the familiar markers of official culture: curated access, mentorship hierarchies, international partnerships, and a public program designed to translate artistic labor into institutional prestige. Nothing here is accidental. The exhibition is built to look open while remaining organized from above, a neat little demonstration of how power likes its art — innovative, funded, and safely inside the frame.