Ask any Venetian custodian what really moves this city, and they’ll point to light. Not the blaze of summer, but the subtle kind, the way a bleak November morning bounces off a stone step and turns it into theatre. This autumn, that quiet drama has a new author. Riyadh is lending Venice its glow.
From 19 October to 23 November 2025, the Fondazione Querini Stampalia opens its Carlo Scarpa-sharpened doors to a capsule exhibition from Noor Riyadh, a warm, glittering foretaste of the 2025 edition of what is billed as the world’s largest light-art festival. It’s an elegant handshake between lagoon and desert, announced without fuss and staged with the old-world civility Venice still does best.
A theme made for both cities
The curatorial banner reads “In the Blink of an Eye”, a phrase that could have been coined for the two cities. Venice changes by millimetres and centuries; Riyadh, by skyline and season. Steering the conversation is Mami Kataoka, in collaboration with Li Zhenhua and Sara AlMutlaq. Their brief is simple but not small: show how Riyadh’s rapid transformation is being framed by culture rather than merely adorned by it.
Four artists, four stories of light
Ayoung Kim fixes her gaze on the new Riyadh Metro, not just an engineering triumph, but a public museum in motion. She maps how stations collect people and ideas, turning routine into exhibition.
Wang Yuyang brings velocity: a portrait of technological lift-off and urban glow, where illumination is not garnish but character.
Abdelrahman Elshahed slows the pulse with calligraphy that draws a clean line between Riyadh and Venice, a reminder that commerce and craft have braided these cities together for centuries.
And a graceful tribute introduces Italian audiences to Safeya Binzagr (1940–2024), the pioneering Saudi modernist whose art stitched international method to local memory long before “global” became a slogan.
Scarpa’s building, the silent fifth artist
Scarpa’s spaces do the rest. Concrete pared to a whisper, water edging thresholds, brass catching daylight as if it were a guest of honour, the building becomes part of the conversation. Light is handled, not hurled. You look, you pause, you notice the small hinge between past and present. It’s a very Venetian way to talk about speed.
A preview, not a spectacle
This is, after all, a prelude. The main act arrives a fortnight later in Saudi Arabia, when Noor Riyadh 2025 runs from 20 November to 6 December, produced by Filmmaster. Riyadh will turn its avenues, parks and landmarks into a city-wide gallery after dark, works ranging from whisper-quiet to jaw-dropping. The Venice capsule doesn’t shout; it suggests. Here are the ideas, here’s the tone and here’s why light remains Riyadh’s most eloquent language.
The manners behind the art
What gives the show its grace is its restraint. The exhibition leans on exchange rather than novelty. Venice has traded in ideas since the first spice ship; Riyadh is writing a modern chapter of that same story. The pieces behave like letters carried across water, some brisk and businesslike, others handwritten and tender. None feels hurried.
Saudi art, as the exhibition gently insists, isn’t a single aesthetic. Kim’s metro vision reads like civic design with a poet’s ear. Wang’s light is urbane, not gaudy. Elshahed’s script behaves like architecture, a space you can’t enter but can inhabit. And Binzagr’s legacy introduces a lineage that predates the current boom and will certainly outlast it.
Why Venice, why now
Because Venice is the world’s most honest mirror, it flatters nothing but rewards care. Place light carelessly and the city will make it garish; place it well and it will sing. Noor Riyadh’s Venetian capsule chooses the latter, measured, courteous, confident, and all the stronger for it.
By the time you step back into the damp evening and see your reflection doubled in a canal window, the impression is plain enough: two cities with very different biographies recognising themselves in each other a metro that becomes a moving museum, a calligraphic bridge between tongues, a modernist remembered kindly, and a festival that treats its preview as a promise, not a pitch.
A conversation conducted the old-fashioned way with craft, with courtesy, and, yes, with light.
For full festival details, visit: https://riyadhart.sa.
By Mario Masciullo – (c) 2025
Read Time: 6 minutes
About the Writer
My career in civil aviation took flight in 1960, beginning with British European Airways (BEA). In 1971, I joined East African Airways (EAA), and shortly thereafter, I was honoured to be selected as one of the qualified candidates for the managerial role at Malaysia & Singapore Airlines (MAS).
In 1972, following the decision by the Malaysian and Singaporean governments to separate the airline into two national carriers, I continued my professional journey with Singapore Airlines. I proudly served as the Marketing Manager for Italy, Greece, and Malta until 1987.
With a journalist’s license I had previously acquired, I decided to transition fully into journalism. My debut was with the Milan-based press agency Milanopress, and I have continued to write and collaborate with both Italian and international press ever since.
I remain active in the field and am a proud member of the Foreign Press Club in Italy, headquartered in Rome.
