Diriyah Art Futures (DAF), an asset of Saudi Arabia’s Museums Commission under the Ministry of Culture, announced on Tuesday the lineup for CONTINUUM 26, an exhibition celebrating the creative output of the participants in its second Emerging New Media Artists Program. The first New Media Arts center in the Middle East and North Africa, DAF is dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary creative practice at the intersection of art, science and technology. The exhibition reflects DAF's efforts to combine arts, research and education to empower the next generation of artists, foster new forms of creative expression and expand Saudi Arabia's creative ecosystem in line with the ambitions of the Museums Commission as part of Saudi Vision 2030. Running from September 3 to November 7, in Diriyah, Riyadh, CONTINUUM 26 is the second installment in an annual exhibition series spotlighting innovative voices shaping the future of new media and digital art in the region and beyond. CONTINUUM 26 showcases the artists' major new works developed during a year-long educational program at Diriyah Art Futures with support from across DAF's Education, Production, and Exhibition departments. Working under the mentorship of acclaimed mentor-artists Louis-Philippe Demers and Rick Treweek, the participants explored new forms of creative expression spanning immersive and multimedia installations, light, sound, moving image, virtual reality, mixed reality, and AI-generated projects. The title CONTINUUM speaks to the ever-evolving nature of creative inquiry that defines the Emerging New Media Artists program. It represents a dynamic process in which divergent artistic trajectories converge around shared thematic inquiries. This continuum reflects both the developmental journey of the participating artists and the fluid boundaries of the topics explored: worlds between reality and artificial reality, organic and synthetic, and human and artificial intelligences. The exhibition is structured around four key thematic pillars that bridge technological experimentation with deeply human questions. Memory as a living process explores personal, collective, environmental, and cultural remembering. Systems of power and optimization examine technology as an extension of human decisions, desires, and control. The Body, perception, and presence shift focus toward embodiment, interspecies relationships, and immersive sensory environments. Repetition, rhythm, and collective experience explore the choreography of automated systems, labor, and human endurance.
