CORTONA.- The 12th edition of international photo festival Cortona On The Move opens its doors today and will run until 2 October 2022.

The festival showcases photography that engages in soul searching and unearthing buried stories through a programme of guided tours, events and exhibitions including Cortona On The Move AlUla which features the work of six specially selected photographers from Saudi Arabia, Italy, Slovakia and The Netherlands following their participation in the inaugural Cortona On The Move AlUla artists residency programme in AlUla, Saudi Arabia, earlier this year.

These six artists will each exhibit works inspired by AlUla’s rich heritage and culture, resulting from the residency programme which offered the opportunity to immerse themselves in the extraordinary landscapes and creative communities of AlUla under the guidance of internationally renowned curators, photographers and lecturers. The Cortona On The Move AlUla collaboration, titled ‘Past Forward - Time, Life and Longing’, explores the idea of the passing of time, whether on a personal and human level, or from a global and environmental perspective.

Cortona On The Move was created to push experimental concepts into the future and promote contemporary photography while encouraging flexibility of interpretation. This vision sits alongside AlUla’s vision to preserve a remarkable history and heritage while inspiring modern art.

The artists and their exhibitions are as follows:

Wrinkles by Hussain AlSumayn (b. 1992, Saudi Arabia)

For his project Hussain AlSumayn photographed the people of AlUla and the mountains surrounding the city, revealing similarities between the forms of the landscapes and human features. He recorded how in old age, people and nature come to look alike in their “wrinkles”.

AlSumayn is a photographer, filmmaker and passionate visual artist who created the first Phone Photography Tour in Saudi Arabia.

A Disparate Familiar by Huda Beydoun (b 1988, Saudi Arabia)

During the residency Beydoun brought an intent to bridge the familiar with the novel and spent time in AlUla seeking to understand all she could from the people, the spaces and the hidden customs that govern them both. During her search, she came across the Madrasat AdDeera, a school where women practice a range of handicrafts. The experience of photographing the day-to-day of these women shaped much of Beydoun’s project.

Beydoun is a visual artist, fashion photographer and Art Director, who exhibited at the 2013 Venice Biennale, and has received several national and international awards

Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear by Martin Kollár (b. 1972, Slovakia)
For Martin Kollár, encountering the raw physicality of the desert was a fascinating experience. He discovered the desert in AlUla as a storage place of the rejected, conserved and untouched, where inscriptions engraved into the ancient sandstones existed alongside yesterday’s graffiti. Abandoned objects in the desert were transformed into a future archaeological warehouse.

Kollár has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of New York, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne.




Fast – Paced by Hayat Osamah (b. 1993 Saudi Arabia)

Having initially been consumed by the challenging nature of the project, Osamah’s journey in AlUla changed her perspective on many fronts. The more she observed, the more she realised that the crucial element to tap into was the people and how changes affect their behaviour.

One of her most profound experiences came through the trust and generosity of a poet, Falah Ameed Al Khamali, who lives in his tent isolated from the noise of a society in transition.

Hayat Osamah is a Riyadh-based artist, photographer and director who has worked with major media brands such as Vogue and GQ.

المرأة (Almar’a) by Eleonora Paciullo (b. 1993, Italy)

Eleonora Paciullo titled her project ‘ المرأة ’ (Almar’a), meaning ‘woman’ in Arabic, and focuses on the Saudi Arabian women she met in AlUla. Her desire to know more about these women stemmed from her interest in discovering new cultures and traditions concerning women’s lives. Her photographs, taken during her artistic residency in AlUla, attempt to record the women behind the niqab, including their dreams and ambitions as leaders, artists and people with a vision to participate in the change that is happening in the Kingdom.

Paciullo is an Italian photographer, book designer and photo-editor of The Light Observer magazine

Under Land by Awoiska van der Molen (b. 1972, The Netherlands)

van der Molen’s work captures her attempt to penetrate into the core of the isolated worlds that she photographs. To create her images, she visits untouched landscapes and unspoilt nature with its natural rhythm. Speaking about her work van der Molen says “I experienced this primordial space while walking through the desert and oases of AlUla. Blinded by sun and by darkest nights, I entered into the liquid world this desert once was.”

van der Molen is a Dutch photographer and visual artist who was selected for Prix Pictet, a world-renowned photography prize dedicated to sustainability; she has also published three books: “The Living Mountain” (2020), “Blanco” (2017) and “Sequester” (2014).

The Royal Commission AlUla’s Arts and Creative Industries

The creation of Arts and Creative Industries within The Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) is a commitment to crafting the next chapters in a millennia of artistic creation – celebrating cultural inheritance, presenting the art of our time, and shaping a future propelled by creativity.

AlUla has long been a consistent and ever-evolving hub of cultural transfer. It has been a place of passage, a crossroads for trade, and home to successive civilisations who carved, sculpted and inscribed their lives into the landscape. The work of Arts and Creative Industries seeks to preserve this legacy: fuse the old with the new; the local with the international, keeping the arts central to the spirit of AlUla as a place of extraordinary natural and human heritage.

Throughout 2022, Arts and Creative Industries will bring to fruition a series of new initiatives, projects and exhibitions. The artwork curation will speak to RCU’s vision for the continued development of AlUla’s contemporary art scenes: positioning the arts as a key contributor to AlUla’s character, the quality of life for its local community and the region’s economic future.

Arts and Creative Industries focuses on transferring the talents of the Saudi nation and the local AlUla community into meaningful long-standing social and economic opportunities. This is a key part of the Journey Through Time masterplan bringing together the 15 different landmark destinations for culture, heritage and creativity across AlUla.