must-see celestial installations of noor riyadh 2025 from metro hubs to the city center

noor riyadh 2025 lights up the saudi capital

From 20 November to 6 December 2025, the world’s largest light art festival transforms six major locations across the Saudi capital into an illuminated citywide gallery. Curated by Mami Kataoka, Sara Almutlaq, and Li Zhenhua, Noor Riyadh brings together 59 artists from 24 countries to present 60 artworks, including more than 35 new commissions, under the theme ‘In the Blink of an Eye.’ With international and local artists like Shinji Ohmaki, atelier oï, Ayoung Kim, Muhannad Shono, and Ziyad Alroqi, the festival explores Riyadh’s rapid transformation, inviting visitors to witness moments of change through large-scale installations across Qasr Al Hokm District, King Abdulaziz Historical Center, stc Metro Station, KAFD Metro Station designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, Al Faisaliah Tower, and JAX District.

Noor Riyadh 2025 brings together 59 artists from 24 countries to present 60 artworks (Between light & stone by Nebras Aljoaib) | all images courtesy of Noor Riyadh

from the historical center to iconic metro stations

Since its launch in 2021, Noor Riyadh has showcased over 550 artworks and welcomed more than 9.6 million visitors. It forms part of the wider Riyadh Art initiative, one of Vision 2030’s four original mega projects, which integrates public art across metro stations, parks, and civic spaces. The festival accelerates the city’s cultural visibility and supports the growth of Saudi Arabia’s creative economy through community engagement, workshops, and educational programs. The 2025 edition’s vibrant Preview Night at stc Metro Station, gathers artists, cultural leaders, and the public beneath immersive projections that ripple across the station’s polished surfaces. The event signals the festival’s ambition: to connect Riyadh’s historic core with its futuristic metro network through bold experiments in light, motion, and architecture. Executive Director Khalid Al-Hazani describes Noor Riyadh as a ‘living expression of the capital’s evolving identity, capturing the convergence of heritage and progress.’

Noor Riyadh’s six locations create distinct atmospheres, each shaped by its architectural and cultural context. In the Qasr Al Hokm District, installations engage with mudbrick geometry and traditional courtyards, generating quiet encounters with time and memory. At the King Abdulaziz Historical Center, light interacts with palm groves and heritage buildings, bathing familiar landmarks in kinetic radiance. Meanwhile, the newly opened KAFD Metro Station becomes a stage for luminous public interventions embedded in the financial district’s glass-and-steel skyline.

drone performance Synthesis by László Zsolt Bordos & Christophe Berthonneau

highlights from noor riyadh 2025

The historic Qasr Al Hokm District becomes a key site where ancient architecture interacts with contemporary light-based forms. A major highlight is James Clar’s When the Sky Reaches the Ground (2025), presented as a strikingly angular sculpture built from neon within a scaffold-like grid. The installation appears as a lightning bolt frozen mid-impact, capturing the speed of energy paused in physical form. Clar’s work reflects on communication systems, technological acceleration, and the narrative potential of suspended time.

Around the corner, Swiss collective Encor Studio introduces Sliced (2025), a corridor of perforated black textile where beams of light, sound, and drifting mist dissolve boundaries between solid space and vaporous atmosphere. Projected right onto the historic Al-Masmak Fort, Abdulrahman AlSoliman’s Place of History’s Inscription (2025) animates the artist’s cubist interpretations of Saudi ritual and geometry. The moving-image work fragments form and space, echoing the cadence of communal movement through disciplined, rhythmic abstraction. Together, all 16 installations render Qasr Al Hokm as a district where heritage architecture becomes a living collaborator.

Sliced by Encor Studio

At the King Abdulaziz Historical Center, Noor Riyadh introduces 24 immersive installations that reinterpret natural forces and celestial cycles through light and sound. Some of the highlights include Wang Yuyang’s Light, Floating Down Like a Feather (2025) that suspends fluorescent tubes in a digitally choreographed cascade, simulating the drifting motion of a feather in air. Each illuminated segment flickers with algorithmic timing while an adjacent computer generates new falling trajectories, turning physics into poetry.

Meanwhile, Belgian collective Traumnovelle presents Troppo Fiso! (2025), a seven-chapter light narrative conceived for a mud-brick courtyard. Drawing from an original long-form performance by a vinyl DJ crew, the Riyadh iteration pairs a recorded score with synesthetic light movements that crescendo into a total spatial immersion. Italian collective fuse* transforms lunar data into an enveloping visual cosmos with Luna Somnium (2025), where generative sound and projected imagery turn the hall into a drifting lunar dreamscape.

Light Float Down Like A Feather by Wang Yuyang

Renowned Japanese artist Shinji Ohmaki expands his celebrated series with Liminal Air Space-Time (2025) with thousands of fine threads suspended in shifting color gradients. Air currents animate the installation into waves of motion, turning the hall into an ephemeral architecture of drift, breath, and quiet transformation. Moreover, Saudi artist Nebras Aljoaib contributes Between Light and Stone (2025), a suspended boulder framed by luminous vertical panels. The composition creates a tension between geological weight and technological glow, echoing the balance between rooted heritage and rapid urban evolution.

With Light to Home (2025), Chinese artist Zhang Zengzeng adds a community-centered installation, using children’s drawings from Riyadh and China and reinterpreting them as glowing sculptural forms overhead, forming a canopy of collective imagination and cross-cultural collaboration. 

Still within the King Abdulaziz Historical Center, Alex Schweder’s Clockwise Invitations (2025) transforms inflatable architecture into a responsive, breathing environment. Fans inflate and deflate chambers in shifting rhythms, allowing visitors to co-create the spatial choreography through movement, proximity, and presence.

All while Edwin van der Heide’s Intersections in Light and Sound (2025) brings experimental sensibilities to the district, programming lasers and audio to sculpt the air and architecture into a synesthetic field where sound becomes visible and light becomes tactile. The installation invites audiences into a dynamic perceptual encounter with the surrounding environment. Just behind it, Swiss design trio atelier oï brings its signature balance of engineering and poetry to Aura (2025), where different discs carry a subtle tint, collectively forming a gradient that shifts as light passes through. In this delicate equilibrium, every breath of wind becomes a collaborator, completing a dialogue between human creation and the natural world. 

Luna Somnium by Fuse

Within the dramatic geometry of KAFD Metro Station, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, two major public artworks enrich Noor Riyadh’s installations. Alexander Calder’s Janey Waney, a monumental kinetic sculpture, takes center stage. Its bold, colorful forms animate the concourse with shifting silhouettes, embodying Calder’s pioneering spirit in mobile and kinetic art. Nearby, Robert Indiana’s LOVE (Red Outside Blue Inside) adds a universally recognizable symbol of connection and optimism — its mirrored surfaces catching and refracting festival lights throughout the district. These permanent sculptures act as anchors for the festival’s contemporary interventions, reinforcing KAFD as a landmark where art, architecture, and motion intersect.

The 2025 edition expands this mission through diverse material languages, from drones and inflatables to lunar data and neon grids, revealing a city transformed by light, imagination, and shared experience.

Troppo Fiso! by Traumnovelle

The new Riyadh Metro stations play a starring role in Noor Riyadh’s urban narrative. At stc Metro Station, dynamic installations interact with the station’s sharp angles and reflective materials, evoking the city’s futurist ambitions. It is here that Noor Riyadh presents one of its most technologically ambitious pairings: László Zsolt Bordos’ Synthesis (2025) and Christophe Berthonneau’s Synthesis Drone Show, curated by Richard Castelli. The station’s façade is transformed into an illusionistic, ever-shifting field of geometric light where surges of illumination make the structure appear to hover, turning its surfaces into a sculptural skin of pure energy. Overhead, Berthonneau’s synchronized drones extend the composition vertically into the sky, weaving real and virtual motion into a choreographed aerial ballet. Together, the works fuse architecture, projection mapping, and airborne choreography into a single living environment, supported by a soundscape by Czech composer Ondřej Skala.

Inside the station, dynamic and delicate kinetic installations introduce intimate counterpoints to the large-scale performance. Wu Chi-Tsung’s DUST 002 explores light as subtle atmospheric motion, channeling granular illumination across surfaces like drifting particulate, while Shun Ito’s Cosmic Birds (2023) composes orbital flocks of wire armatures and pinpoint LEDs. A former dancer, Ito brings choreographic sensitivity to the kinetic sculptures, their arcs tracing celestial rhythms that hover between model and constellation. Together with Guillaume Cousin’s ‘Le Silence des Particules (2018)’ pulse of the perfect ring of mist, Shiro Takatani’s Dumb Type STLL for the 3D WATER MATRIX who choreographs a symphony of animated water and light, and other fascinating works, the stc Metro Station into a nexus of scale, from monumental to microscopic, grounded in motion, precision, and light.

Dumb Type STLL for the 3D WATER MATRIX by Shiro Takatani

Le Silence Des Particules by Guillaume Cousin

Aura by atelier oï & WonderGlass

Clockwise Invitations by Alex Schweder

Dust 002 by Wu Chi-Tsung

Cosmic Birds by Shun Ito

The Light To Home by Zhang Zengzeng

project info:

name: Noor Riyadh 2025 | @noorriyadhfestival

organization: Riyadh Art

curation: Mami Kataoka, Li Zhenhua, and Sara Almutlaq

dates: 20 November – 6 December, 2025

location: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

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