Nathalie Bachand

Art Must Be Artificial: Perspectives of AI in the Visual Arts

Diriyah Art Futures, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
26th of November 2025 –
15th of February 2025


Last November a new centre for digital art and new technologies was inaugurated in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The first of its kind in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region: located in Riyadh, the Diriyah Art Futures (DAF) is part of a vast project of the Saudi Museums Commission, of the Ministry of Culture. As a diffusion space, research laboratory and educational hub (in collaboration with Le Fresnoy in France), DAF offers a focus at the crossroads of art, science and technology. Exhibition, creative residency, class and workshop programs will be launched in the coming months. DAF is also a remarkable architectural complex that the Italian firm Schiattarella Associati1 designed and built. The historic city of Diriyah, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, inspired this ensemble of five interconnected buildings. And from this historical reference, the architects drew lines of perspective that integrate with the land and form of fusion between the buildings and the surrounding natural landscape.  

The inaugural exhibition, entitled Art Must Be Artificial: Perspectives of AI in the Visual Arts, is the result of an encounter between a curating by Jérôme Neutres, a major loan of works from the Computing Art collection of the Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation2, as well as the creations of Saudi artists, including commissioned work. In all, about fifty works of thirty-one artists


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Manfred Mohr, P-511-O, 1995-1997. Avec l’aimable permission de/Courtesy of Diriyah Art Futures ©.
Yining Fei & Chuck Kuan, Breakfast Ritual: Art Must Be Artificial, 2019. Avec l’aimable permission de/Courtesy of Diriyah Art Futures ©.
Davide Quayola, Hercules and Nessus #A_01, 2022. Avec l’aimable permission de/Courtesy of Diriyah Art Futures ©.
Laurent Mignonneau & Christa Sommerer, Homo Insectus, 2020. Avec l’aimable permission de/Courtesy of Diriyah Art Futures ©.
Daniah Al-Saleh, Smile Please!, 2022. Avec l’aimable permission de/Courtesy of Diriyah Art Futures ©.
Haythem Zakaria, Interstices Opus III, 2022. Avec l’aimable permission de/Courtesy of Diriyah Art Futures ©.
Anna Ridler, Mosaic Virus, 2019. Avec l’aimable permission de/Courtesy of Diriyah Art Futures ©.
Miguel Chevalier, Extra Natural, 2018. Avec l’aimable permission de/Courtesy of Diriyah Art Futures ©.
John Gerrard, Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), 2017. Avec l’aimable permission de/Courtesy of Diriyah Art Futures ©.
Schiattarella Associati ©, Diriyah Art Futures. Photo : Hassan Ali Al-Shatti.