Curator Series: Iwona Blazwick
Currently the lead curator of the Wadi Al Fann Al-'Ula Royal Comission in Saudi Arabia and the former Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (2001-2022.)
Naso Art Journal is delighted to welcome Iwona Blazwick OBE as the next guest in our Curator Series. As Naso Art Journal is committed to covering the art and art agents shaping the cultural landscape of the region, Blazwick's remarkable contributions in Saudi Arabia make her a pivotal figure in this context-bringing visionary leadership and curatorial innovation to one of the most ambitious art initiatives in the MENA region.
Blazwick currently serves as Lead Curator of the Wadi AlFann project under the Royal Commission for AlUla, where she is overseeing an unprecedented program of large-scale, site-specific works that respond to the region's unique desert landscape. Her tenure as Director of London's Whitechapel Gallery from 2001 to 2022 cemented her international reputation, during which she curated and commissioned over 100 exhibitions across the UK and beyond, often granting emerging artists their first major solo shows. Among those she championed early in their careers are Peter Doig, Damien Hirst, Barbara Kruger, Cristina Iglesias, Julian Opie, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, and Fiona Rae.
Blazwick's career reflects an enduring commitment to expanding the possibilities of contemporary art-nurturing young talent, fostering cross-cultural exchange, and situating art within both local and global narratives. In Saudi Arabia, her work at AlUla exemplifies how art can engage deeply with place, history, and community, setting new benchmarks for cultural practice in the region and beyond.
Wadi al-Fann: A Conversation with Iwona Blazwick
In the measured expanse of the Saudi desert, between the ancient Nabataean tombs and the shifting light, Iwona Blazwick envisions a new chapter for contemporary art. Formerly the Director of London's Whitechapel Gallery for two decades, Blazwick now serves as Chair of the Royal Commission for AlUla's Public Art Expert Panel, guiding Wadi al-Fann - an ambitious, permanent land art initiative unfolding across the dramatic sandstone valleys of north-western Saudi Arabia.
Speaking from London, where she remains based, Blazwick reflects on the intellectual, cultural, and ecological stakes of curating in this historic moment.
"At Whitechapel, we worked primarily with living artists, often at pivotal mid-career moments," she recalls. "Our role was not to create definitive retrospectives, but to examine a particular theme or strand in an artist's practice and open that to a wider public." That approach, she explains, proved invaluable when commissioning works in AlUla:
"It's about distilling a theme, identifying the essence of a practice, and framing it in a way that resonates in a completely different landscape."
Yet the shift from London's urban density to the vastness of Wadi al-Fann is not merely geographic — it is philosophical.
"In the desert, the context is stripped to its essentials. You are in dialogue with geological time, with histories carved into stone, and with communities whose roots are centuries deep. The clarity of that environment allows certain narratives - whether architectural, ecological, or intangible — to come into sharp focus."
The tension between contemporary intervention and ancient heritage is, for Blazwick, the project's core curatorial question. The works now in progress by artists such as Manal AlDowayan, Agnes Denes, Michael Heizer, and James Turrell bridge millennia.
"They are responding not just to the land as material, but to the cultural memory embedded in it," she says. "Manal draws directly on the thousand-year-old mudbrick architecture of AlUla's Old Town, reimagining it as a desert labyrinth. Ahmed Mater engages with the Islamic philosopher Al-Haytham's Book of Optics, exploring perception and illusion. These are not impositions upon the landscape, but extensions of its own histories."
While Wadi al-Fann shares formal affinities with the land art movement of the American West, Blazwick resists the idea that it is a derivative undertaking.
"Those first-generation land artists - Turrell, Heizer, Denes - transformed perceptions of the desert, revealing its sublimity. But what's happening here adds a layer that is entirely specific to the Arabian Peninsula: a cultural and social dimension rooted in pre-national histories, in the flows of the incense routes, and in the intellectual traditions of the Arab world. It is both deeply local and universal."
That duality — local depth and global resonance — is also at the heart of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030, which positions culture as a driver of social and economic transformation.
"We see Wadi al-Fann as a hub for the global art community," Blazwick says. "It's generative - a place where international artists come to create, and from which works and ideas radiate outward. Equally, it's about building local capacity: training young people in traditional crafts, fostering curatorial skills, and embedding contemporary practice within the community."
The artists' residency programme in AlUla, she notes, is emblematic of this approach.
"It's housed in a building where one side faces the town's everyday bustle and the other overlooks an oasis. That coexistence of the urban and the natural, the human and the non-human, is a metaphor for the whole project."
Blazwick is clear that equity and diversity are non-negotiable principles. "Every programme we curate — whether Desert X or Wadi al-Fann — ensures gender parity and global representation," she states. "It's vital that these monumental works emerge from a multiplicity of perspectives."
Ultimately, she frames the project as both a contribution to and a challenge for art history.
"We want Wadi al-Fann to be a 21st-century centre for land art, one that reflects the philosophical and ecological ethos of AlUla while opening new discursive terrain. The desert, far from being empty or inert, becomes a site of profound cultural production - and of welcome. Hospitality has been part of this region's DNA for centuries. It's time the world experienced that first-hand."
In the coming years, as the works rise from the sands and the dialogue between past and present deepens, Blazwick envisions Wadi al-Fann not as a static monument, but as an evolving conversation between artists, communities, and the land itself.
"Without the past, there is no future," she says, echoing a phrase shared by Manal AlDowayan.