Artwork: Kimsooja, *To Breathe-Alula*, Saudi Arabia, 2024

A wonderful installation has been created for Desert X AlUla2024 in Saudi Arabia by Korean artist Kimsooja titled, To Breathe- AlUla. Kimsooja’s installations are often meditative spaces where she engages with the natural environment and the quality of light; blurring boundaries, and exploring ways of seeing where space seems to unfold so that solid surfaces and structures appear fluid and expansive. I wrote an art story of her Yorkshire Sculpture Park installation, also titled To Breathe, 2019. Viewers of the AIUla installation walk a spiral structure where light refracts into rainbows, the sky above, the desert sand beneath. Kimsooja often says in interviews that her interest is in “being nothing/nothingness and making nothing/nothingness”, where breath connects the viewer through the process of inhaling and exhaling with their surrounds, and the work of art itself.

Kimsooja said this about the Desert X installation: “To Breathe-AlUla” is a reflection on a conceptual and geometrical formation of the AlUla desert landscape. It reflects the movement of wind and the passage of light traversing through the spiral path of prismatic glass surface that becomes a fluid, translucent canvas. Sunlight unravels into an iridescent color spectrum, casting rainbow colored shadows and circular brushstrokes onto the sandy earth. Audiences partake in a contemplative performance by walking through and gazing at the shifting light spectrums, which render visible vibrations of light normally invisible to the naked eyes. A walk in and out of a contained yet open path of spiral unfolds an abstract lightscape that is at once a drawing, a painting, and a sculpture.”