The Desert as Negative Space: Land Art at AlUla's Wadi AlFann

In north-west Saudi Arabia, in a valley ringed by the sandstone walls of Hegra, there is almost nothing. Across a dry upland some thousand metres above sea level, red-brown masses of rock scoured by 200 million years of wind stand scattered, and a floor of sand fills the space between them. At night, with no ranks of man-made structures to block the light as there would be in a city, the Milky Way runs from horizon to horizon. Since 2022, a plan has been in motion to place here the permanent works of the major figures of world land art. The valley is called Wadi AlFann — literally, the Valley of the Arts.

What TENKEI has followed until now is the screen that adds light to a city's walls and squares. Vivid Sydney, or Lyon's Fête des Lumières, are undertakings that lay one further layer of light, for a limited season, over streets already saturated with information and neon. What AlUla presents is the inverse. There is no city here to add to. What there is instead is an outrageous expanse of negative space that seems to have spent 200 million years waiting to be carved. The works are placed not to "add" light or form to that blank, but to make the blank itself visible.

The Valley of the Arts, Five Commissions

Wadi AlFann is run by the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU). Established by the Saudi government in 2017, it is the public body that oversees culture, tourism and nature conservation across the whole of the AlUla region, with jurisdiction over a vast cultural territory that includes the UNESCO World Heritage site of Hegra — the first place in Saudi Arabia to be inscribed. Wadi AlFann was announced as one corner of that cultural strategy: a scheme to turn a valley of some 65 square kilometres, in its entirety, into a single stage for permanent land art.

Five artists were commissioned first. Three masters who embody the lineage of land art — James Turrell, Agnes Denes and Michael Heizer — stand alongside two artists who represent Saudi Arabia, Ahmed Mater and Manal AlDowayan. Each work is conceived less as "building" a structure on the ground than as intervening in the topography of the valley itself.

Michael Heizer will incise lines into the face of the Quweira sandstone. Accompanied by tunnels and staircases, it is an inscription fused with the terrain, its appearance shifting each time the viewer walks and changes position. Agnes Denes — a pioneer of environmental art, in her nineties at the time of writing — will carve a series of pyramids into the rock, inscribing the themes of civilisation, progress and achievement into the valley. Ahmed Mater's Ashab Al-Lal is a work that goes underground, conceived as a subterranean space using mirrors and taking as its subject the transmission of knowledge in the Islamic Golden Age. Manal AlDowayan's Oasis of Stories is a labyrinthine installation drawn from the mud walls of AlUla's Old Town, placing at its centre collective memory and the voices that have never been written into it — the presence of women above all.

And then James Turrell. The artist who has led the Light and Space movement for half a century will bore a series of spaces into the valley floor: a sequence of chambers linked by tunnels and staircases, made so that one experiences "the thingness of light" itself. The published plans are said to include four Skyspaces, large and small, each handling a different aspect of the sky. designboom called them "cosmic observatories". Turrell's work does not kindle a light in the desert. The opposite: it governs and pares back all the surrounding light so that only the sky beyond the aperture rises up, as a single plane.

Exhibitions That Come Before the Works

The permanent works at Wadi AlFann were first set for 2024, then moved to a staged unveiling from 2026 onward. At the time of writing the valley is still not open to the public. And yet audiences too impatient to wait for the works already gather in the AlUla desert every winter — because, ahead of the permanent opening, two "trailers" have been running.

One is the solo exhibition. At the AlUla Arts Festival, from January to April 2025, a Turrell solo show titled "Wadi AlFann presents James Turrell" was held. It was curated by Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Alongside Turrell's light works, the renderings, drawings and star charts for the permanent commission to be set into Wadi AlFann were exhibited. To show the plans for a work that does not yet exist, in advance and in the middle of a desert — a strange and carefully judged manoeuvre, something like a groundbreaking ceremony in architecture.

The other trailer is Desert X AlUla. Begun in 2020 as a collaboration between the Californian non-profit Desert X and the RCU, it is the region's first public-art biennial: a free exhibition that scatters temporary site-specific works across the desert. It has since run in 2020, 2022, 2024 and 2026, commissioning more than 45 new works. What matters is that some of these commissions have not been removed at the close of the run but acquired into the RCU's permanent collection. The seasonal exhibition functions as a seedbed for the permanent valley.

Line up the themes of the successive editions and what the project is thinking shows through. The third edition, in 2024, was "In the Presence of Absence" — it asked what it is that cannot be seen, and made the very convention of regarding the desert as emptiness its subject. Raneem Farsi and Neville Wakefield served as artistic directors, and fifteen works were shown under the curation of Maya El Khalil and Marcello Dantas. The fourth edition, which opened in January 2026, took the theme "Space Without Measure". It was announced as drawing on the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran; curated by Wejdan Reda and Zoé Whitley, it brought together eleven artists including Agnes Denes, Ibrahim El-Salahi and Tarek Atoui. Absence, emptiness, the unmeasurable — every one of these themes tries to treat "there being nothing there" not as a deficit but as positive content.

Kindling a Point in the Blank

Here I want to bring in the two concepts TENKEI has used again and again — ma, the interval, and tenkei, the point in a landscape. Discussing a city's festival of light, the pair sat a little awkwardly: a saturated street has scarcely any ma left to open in the first place. But the AlUla desert exists almost as ma itself. A dry valley with nothing in it, a night sky nothing obstructs, an enormous blank prepared by 200 million years of weathering. "Absence" and "space without measure", the terms Desert X raises, sit remarkably close to what East Asian painting has long called the blank, the interval.

The works placed in that blank do the same work as the tenkei of ink-wash painting — the traveller or the boat brushed as a single dot onto a distant mountainside. Tenkei does not occupy the landscape. Rather, it gives scale, direction and time, for the first time, to a space that was merely wide. Because one boat is drawn, the breadth of the river becomes legible. Because one traveller stands there, the height of the mountain becomes legible. Heizer cutting a single line into sandstone, Denes carving one pyramid, Turrell boring one aperture into the sky — all of them are marks that paradoxically make the unmeasurability of the desert measurable. It is not that the works are great. It is that by placing the works, the sheer immensity of the valley rises up for the first time.

Turrell's handling of light embodies this point most sharply. Where a city's festival of light "projects and adds" imagery onto the surface of a building, Turrell subtracts light. He governs the surrounding light precisely, pares it back, and beyond the one aperture left at the end makes the desert sky alone stand up like a painting. In his Skyspaces, the screen is not an apparatus; it is the sky itself. One hesitates for a moment over whether the concept of "signage" TENKEI has dealt with — a luminous surface set into a street — may be extended this far. But on the single point of controlling light so that a plane rises up, Turrell's chambers on the valley floor share the same question as the giant LEDs of the city. Not what to show, but where and how to open a plane.

Outlook — A Place Where What Is Missing Can Be the Subject

That Saudi Arabia commits capital on a national scale to cultural projects carries, naturally, a political context. Wadi AlFann is part of it, and, like Dubai's Museum of the Future, sits within the larger current by which the Gulf states are trying to draw a post-oil image of the city as a "cultural destination". This journal does not take the position of discounting that context in its reading; equally, it does not reduce the specificity of the works placed there to that context either. The fact that Agnes Denes, in her nineties, is carving pyramids into a desert, and the fact that Turrell is boring the culmination of half a century of enquiry into a valley floor, are worth recording in themselves. Denes's moving-image work has, incidentally, appeared on the roster of broadcast artists for CIRCA, which kindles a three-minute tenkei on city screens around the world every night. The same artist is setting out to leave two tenkei of utterly different time and place: on one hand a planetary network of screens, on the other the permanent rock of a desert.

A city's screen brings a tenkei into being by opening a gap in a saturated street. The AlUla valley does the reverse: it brings a tenkei into being by striking the first mark into a gap that is all but infinite. The directions are opposite, but the principle is the same. A landscape does not become a landscape by itself. Only once a single small presence has been kindled within it does it begin to hold breadth, depth and time.

When the permanent works of Wadi AlFann stand in the valley, five tenkei will appear between the red-brown rock and the full field of stars. The desert will not be made smaller by them. Having gained the works as a measure, it will reveal its unmeasurability for the first time. Negative space becomes negative space only once something is kindled in it.

Sources

1. fig.001Wadi AlFann — Places to Go | Experience AlUla
2. fig.002Desert X AlUla — AlUla Arts Festival | Experience AlUla
3. fig.003Desert X AlUla 2024 (DX24 AlUla) — Desert X
4. [4]Colossal installations at AlUla’s arts valley: from Ahmed Mater to James Turrell + Agnes Denes — designboom(2022-12-12)
5. [5]The French Agency for AlUla Development announces five era-defining artworks for Wadi AlFann — AFALULA(2022-12)
6. [6]Wadi AlFann presents James Turrell — Gagosian(2025-01)
7. [7]James Turrell reveals "sequence of chambers" for AlUla desert — Dezeen(2025-01-23)
8. [8]James Turrell unveils plans for colossal ‘cosmic observatories’ land art in AlUla — designboom(2025-01-21)
9. [9]Manal AlDowayan Unearths Historic and Contemporary Narratives for Wadi AlFann — ArtReview
10. [10]Desert X AlUla 2024 | February 9 – March 23 — Desert X(2024-02)
11. [11]Desert X 2026 AlUla is Now Open — Desert X(2026-01)

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU), Saudi Arabia

LOCATION

AlUla

MODEL

Operator commission — RCU commissions permanent site-specific works from international artists, running the seasonal public-art biennial Desert X AlUla (since 2020) as a pre-opening programme and acquiring its commissions into a permanent collection

ARTIST PAY

Permanent commissions for large-scale site-specific works; Desert X AlUla commissions acquired by RCU

CADENCE

Permanent installations (initial works to be unveiled from 2026) plus the seasonal Desert X AlUla biennial (winter–spring)

SPEC

c. 65 sq km; five initial permanent commissions (James Turrell, Agnes Denes, Michael Heizer, Ahmed Mater, Manal AlDowayan)

SINCE

2020

STATUS

Active — The permanent Wadi AlFann site is in development; a James Turrell exhibition (2025) and Desert X AlUla (2026) have run as pre-opening programmes

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