As the hype of “IRL” socializing under the translucent canopy of the 1981 Hajj Terminal has seceded, and we, or perhaps just me, are left in a delirium of conversation fatigue and a fog of meaning, the Islamic Art Biennale remains. Saudi’s inaugural event is as contested a thematic, as it is a sensory experience. One fluctuated between the rhythms of slowness that the soft beige Teflon canopy invited, and the speculative hum of a contemporary art scene eager to digest, gossip and forecast. If silent enough, as you walk through the five OMA designed galleries, or between the follies of speculative architectural work outside, one can hear the murmur made by thousands of hurried footsteps racing to Mecca. If space contains collective memory, if the lore of communities is held within the material units of our world, then SOM’s Hajj Terminal made that relation very vivid.

Our visual cortex is overwhelmed on a daily basis with thousands of pixels of imagery, perforating the silk screen of our pupils, congregating, filtering and shuffling in our brains. The polygons of 3D forms are then processed at the control room of our perception. Our mother’s Acacia tree and every single one of its leaves, the irregularity of a tile beneath it, curving around another, the other made of squares. The air above, dense with nomadic dust, traveling from empty quarters to barren seas. The driver and the many follicles of hair piercing his scalp, forming an ocean around an island at its apex. The car, filled with papers, the papers filled with letters, the letters filled with ink. Our lives are filled with information, some dense with history, others like vapor, forming only an environment for our memories. Our minds, make a sketch of this density, reducing it to digestible bits of electrons, and as we project our minds eye back to optical form, we sketch yet again, a physical sketch of a mental one.