Desert-X is a biennale of site-specific art installations in the desert, about 100 miles east of Los Angeles, spread over a large area in the Coachella Valley. The 2025 edition, its fifth, exhibited several artists from different parts of the world. The following is a selection, best visualized in the short documentary included here.
Sarah Meyohas’s installation, Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams, immediately caught our attention. The fluid serpentine form of the sculpture relates to the context with an architectural quality. Following some research on this young artist, I realized that she is an original thinker. The range of the media in which she works includes photography, film, holography and artificial intelligence. For the preview presentation, she brought a dance company from Los Angeles, Jacob Jonas, that performed in synchronization with Meyohas work. These two works, the installation and the dancing group, respectively, reminded me of the works of two Israeli artists: sculptor Dani Karavan and choreographer Ohad Naharin (Mr. Gaga.)
On the opposite side of Meyohas’s freshness, was the Hungarian-American environmental artist and writer Agnes Denes, 94. She had been ahead of her time in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the principles of the Land Art movement were established. Here, in the desert, she used the iconic form of a pyramid, titled The Living Pyramide, to express the life cycle of native vegetation.
Architect-artist Ronal Rael’s work Adobe Oasis built zigzagging walls entirely of mud, using a 3D printer and robotic programming. This approach could be meaningful for the future of architecture in many parts of the world.
Swiss artist Raphael Hefti’s Five things you can’t wear on TV, brings the effects of great distance to proximity. The oscillating line blurs our sense of spatial perception, scale, and distance and resonates with the surrounding landscape.
Alison Saar is an LA artist who created Soul Service Station, which was inspired by gas stations around the country.
Jose Davila made this installation, The act of being together, out of large marble blocks extracted from a quarry a few hundred miles across the U.S- Mexico border.
Canuupa Hanska Luger created G.H.O.S.T. Ride, an installation meant to house a family from an unknown time.
