ARTS & CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT | The New Digital – Art Museum Is Coming To Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Culture has announced a collaboration with international art collective teamLab to create a digital-art museum as part of the Kingdom’s Vision 2030. The museum will be located in Jeddah, and is set to be called TeamLab Borderless Jeddah and will open in 2023. The 10 – year collaboration agreement between Saudi and TeamLab will see artwork from ‘Saudi’s burgeoning creative talents in the converging fields of art and technology supporting the Kingdom’s cultural transformation’. TeamLab Borderless museum offer immersive and interactive experiences for the viewers to be part of the work.

TeamLab was founded in 2001 in Japan by Toshiyuki Inoko and is described as ‘an interdisciplinary group of various specialists such as artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, and architects whose collaborative practice seek to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, and the natural world’. The exhibition follows Tokyo – based art collective TeamLab’s dedication to going ‘borderless’, reflecting the way artworks travel beyond the physical borders that humans have created.

A spokeswoman for TeamLab told The Art Newspaper, ‘TeamLab Borderless is a group of artworks that form one borderless world. Some of the works will explore creative physical spaces and collaborative creativity, to help inspire the next generation of creative. We continue to expand this idea of TeamLab Borderless’.

The Jeddah center will follow similar exhibition of ‘TeamLab Borderless’ the first which was estabilished in Tokyo, in June 2018 and then Shanghai in November 2019. It will also feature a section dedicated to children, focusing on science and art education helping to inspire future generations of Saudi creative. Alongside the education section, TeamLab Borderless Jeddah is also intended to be a tourist attraction for visitors to the region, with the Tokyo and Shanghai exhibitions being popular among tourists and celebrities alike.

Saudi’s Vision 2030 project will see a host of attractions introduced to the Kingdom, in the hope of diversifying the economy in order to reduce the country’s reliance on oil.