In recent years, initiatives such as Art D'Égypte and DesertX have challenged the standard white-cube exhibition format popular in museums and galleries globally, by presenting public art in natural environments, including deserts. Art D’Egypte’s Forever is Now III (October 25-November 17, 2023) is one such exhibition held in the landscape surrounding Egypt's Pyramids of Giza, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The exhibition is organised by Art D'Égypte/CulturVator, an organisation founded by Nadine Abdel Ghaffar that aims to foster art and community programmes throughout Egypt and, consequently, to breathe new life into historic and public spaces through contemporary art for an ever-growing audience.

For Forever is Now III, the French artist JR presented an installation that transformed spectators into actors. Inside Out Giza (2022-23) is a vast tapestry of black and white portraits gathered through the artist’s participation in the second edition of Forever is Now in 2022, when visitors engaged with an interactive photo booth to have their portrait taken. This year, the artist presented 130 of these large-scale portraits as brief personal statements, forming a 20m-long composite artwork that fosters a community dialogue with the UNESCO World Heritage Site. JR terms his practice “infiltrating art”; his photographic collage techniques democratise art’s display in public settings to support communities worldwide, transform stories into public art and enact social change.

To gain a deeper insight on how public exhibition formats in natural landscapes foster new forms of engagement, STIR spoke with Diana Campbell, the guest curator of DesertX 2023, about the collective aesthetic experience of the festival in Coachella Valley, Southern California. Campbell noted that exhibition audiences, especially those living in and around Palm Springs, felt a close association with the artworks on display and felt a sense of togetherness through the exhibition. Among the works that were best received among audiences, she cites the “soft sculptures by an emerging Mexican artist (Paloma Contreras Lomas’s Amar a Dios en Tierra de Indios, Es Oficio Maternal, 2023) sprawling all over what appeared to be a crashed car; to a large-scale, country-fair-style board game where visitors could epically fail and cheat at trying to show their lack of knowledge of indigenous histories (Gerald Clarke’s Immersion, 2023), to a larger-than-life sleeping giant made out of shipping containers (Matt Johnson’s Sleeping Figure, 2023) that looked like a train crash.” Campbell notes that it "was a joyful show—full of hope in the midst of a climate crisis." 

It is noteworthy how naturally the presenting artists in Forever is Now III evolved their art installations to adapt to the landscape and interpreted Egypt's culture and history. Several artists reimagined depictions of architecture and the liminality of the pyramids. The Saudi Arabian artist Rashed Al Shashai, who also presented work at DesertX AlUla in Saudi Arabia in 2022, introduced Translucent Pyramid(2023), presented a site-specific art installation that imitated the silhouette of the pyramids, paying homage to Egypt's traditional craft of wicker weaving with the choice of materials. The Egyptian artist Mohamed Banawy's sculptural installation As Above, So Below (Dome of Starry Sky) (2023) is made of star-shaped modules that appear to dance with the wind, juxtaposing the balance of material and spiritual life. With Temple •I• (2023), the French artist Stéphan Breuer imitated the pyramids' shape with a golden inverted triangle suspended in space, representing a divine apparition. Similarly, the UAE-based artist Azza Al Qubaisi presents a maze-like art installation titled Treasures (2023). The metallic installation juxtaposes the ever-changing desert landscape with cultural memories of ancient monuments.

Conceptions of the sacred and the natural align seamlessly at Forever is Now III. Take, for instance, the Ancient Egyptian god representative of the sun, Ra, who has been introduced through the Greek artist Dionysios's and the Dutch artist Sabine Marcelis’s art installations. Dionysios's sublime work Meditation on Light (2023) is a rectangular tapestry of gold leaf processed through artificial intelligence (AI) that seamlessly merges with the sand. The markings on this installation follow the sun’s journey from dusk to dawn and represent a conversation between Apollo, the Ancient Greek god of light, and Ra. Similarly, Marcelis named her installation RA (2023) to celebrate the land of the pyramids as the birthplace of the sundial, transforming sunlight into energy and keeping the desert aglow in the dark, too.

Against the threatening backdrop of the climate crisis, one questions whether in the 21^st century there is an urge to blur the boundaries between the natural world and the world of culture. Campbell shared valuable insight from her experience as guest curator of Desert X 2023, noting: “Nature and culture are always together. Just think of the word agriculture. The climate controlled rooms of formal exhibition spaces in galleries and museums (which are important to preserve artworks for the future) can make us forget the nature/culture connection sometimes…  But the climate crisis even affected the exhibition of DesertX 2023—a freak freeze with cold rain and hail storms severely impacted how one of the works looked at the last minute. It was still profoundly beautiful—but not what we had imagined. This will keep happening and I find this space interesting—how artists create with natural conditions, rather than wasting resources trying to fight it.”

As at Art D'Égypte, a departure from the traditional exhibition format enables art to breathe the same air as history, nature and community. Among other leading festivals and biennials, Art D'Égypte and DesertX are redefining the imperatives of a holistic art exhibition. To quote Campbell: “When you experience works of art in the landscape, you can’t forget when and where you are.”