This article covers the open-air exhibition Desert X AlUla 2026 within the AlUla Arts Festival, outlining its curatorial theme 'Space Without Measure.' The piece also highlights Indian artist Vibha Galhotra’s participation, detailing her installation 'Future Fables', its use of reclaimed construction debris, its pavilion-like structure, and how it engages themes of sustainability, material reuse, and ecology within the desert context.
The Lebanese-American poet and thinker Kahlil Gibran wrote often about the limitless qualities of human experience, seeing inner life and imagination as spaces that exceed fixed boundaries. In one of his reflections on dreams and possibility, Gibran remarked that “dreams are time limitless and provide space without measure,” suggesting that the inner life — our hopes, narratives, and ways of seeing the world — cannot be constrained by physical or conceptual limits. For Gibran, dreams describe a space where the individual moves beyond social rules, religious authority, and national borders.
This notion of unbounded perception and spatial imagination underlies the “Space Without Measure” theme for Desert X AlUla 2026, the latest edition of the open-air exhibition presented within the AlUla Arts Festival. Curators Wejdan Reda and Zoé Whitley invited 11 Saudi and international artists to respond to AlUla’s unequalled terrain through a range of practices, including kinetic sculpture, environmental sound, sculptural systems and ecological forms, that engage scale, perception, and spatial experience in relation to the landscape. Across canyons, valleys and sandstone expanses, sculptures and installations explore ideas of scale, movement, ecology, heritage and transformation, drawing attention to AlUla as a place shaped by both deep geological time and centuries of human settlement. Artists in this edition include Sara Abdu, Tarek Atoui, Basmah Felemban, Agnes Denes, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Hector Zamora and Vibha Galhotra, among others.
Desert X AlUla is a core component of the AlUla Arts Festival, an annual cultural programme that includes exhibitions, performances, film screenings, public talks, design showcases and community projects across the region’s oases, valleys and urban centres. Conceptually, Desert X AlUla sets itself apart by dispersing artwork into open terrain, where visitors follow mapped routes to encounter installations that react to natural elements and the environment. The festival runs until the end of February, with Desert X scheduled through Feb. 28, 2026.
Among the international group featured in the exhibition is Indian artist Vibha Galhotra, based in New Delhi and known for work that examines environmental change, urban transformation and consumption patterns. For this exhibition, Vibha presents Future Fables, a new site-responsive installation made from repurposed construction debris and concrete rubble. Material for the work includes fragments of demolished buildings — bricks, slabs and terrazzo — sourced and re-assembled within a structural steel frame, converting what is normally discarded into a permanent, physical presence in the desert.
At Desert X, Vibha’s piece takes the form of a circular, shaded pavilion. The design includes bench-style seating and a partially enclosed space that functions as a place to sit, talk and engage with the structure. Its configuration references shelters and meeting places common in desert environments, and positions visitors physically within the work. The choice of material explicitly raises issues tied to sustainability and upcycling: by using waste concrete — a product of both urban growth and demolition, the sculpture confronts the environmental footprint of construction industries and the persistent legacy of material surplus.
Vibha’s Future Fables further extends into participation with the internal space, inviting visitors to engage collectively, talk and consider the implications of the materials that surround them. Concrete, once a marker of progress, here becomes a prompt to think about waste systems, consumerism and how ordinary urban by-products can be repurposed to create new forms. The work’s siting in AlUla’s desert, with its deep geological history and absence of urban sprawl, intensifies that juxtaposition. Her practice consistently foregrounds material choices that reflect ecological conditions, and this installation continues that emphasis by making material legibility a central element of its presence in the landscape.
Across Desert X AlUla 2026, Galhotra’s installation sits among other ambitious commissions — from sound sculptures to living botanical pyramids, each rooted in the specific topography of AlUla’s valleys. Together, they anchor the festival’s commitment to expanding how contemporary art enters into dialogue with physical histories through land and its materials.
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