Three major biennials announce curatorial teams for 2021-2022 editions in Saudi Arabia, Russia and Turkey

Saudi Arabia will launch its first biennial in 2022 with Philip Tinari leading a curatorial team including Shixuan Luan, Neil Zhang and Wejdan Reda. The Ad-Diriyah Biennale will focus on Islamic art and be held in an eighteenth-century UNESCO World Heritage site undergoing redevelopment into a cultural district with museums, galleries and retail. Russia's Ural Industrial Biennial has appointed Çağla Īlk, Misal Adnan Yıldız and Assaf Kimmel to curate its sixth edition this autumn across Ekaterinburg and other Ural cities, exploring themes of touch, intimacy and industrial architecture. The Istanbul Biennial's seventeenth edition opens September 11 with curators Ute Meta Bauer, Amar Kanwar and David Teh, who describe their approach as a 'great dispersal' rather than a traditional gathering. These announcements signal cautious optimism for the return of major international art events after most were postponed or moved online in 2020. The Ural biennial's theme 'Thinking hands, touching each other' directly addresses pandemic-era concerns about physical interaction. Tinari brings his experience from Beijing's UCCA Center for Contemporary Art to Saudi Arabia's new cultural initiative under the Ministry of Culture. Both Īlk and Yıldız recently became directors of Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, while Kimmel works as an architect and curator based in Germany.