Where the Desert Speaks

Exploring Sculptural Stories, Immersive Art, and Cross-Cultural Narratives at Desert X

Founded on the belief that contemporary art can foster cross-cultural understanding, Desert X produces biennial exhibitions in desert environments, addressing themes like environmental change, Indigenous histories, and global concerns. By transforming the landscape into a canvas for artistic dialogue, Desert X offers both artists and audiences a space for reflection beyond the confines of museums and galleries. Since 2017, its California desert exhibitions have featured dozens of international artists and attracted over 1.7 million visitors seeking immersive, thought-provoking experiences. Each exhibition invites viewers to experience art not just as a visual encounter but as a meaningful response to global concerns and the emotional, historical, or social narratives embedded in the desert landscape.

Mirage

I was very fortunate to be in Palm Springs in 2017 while the inaugural Desert X art exhibit was taking place. I was most excited to see an installation titled Mirage by the artist Doug Aitken. In the tradition of land art reflecting American West aspirations, Mirage featured a mirror-clad, ranch-style house that continuously blurred boundaries between interior and exterior, subject and object. The installation created a visual echo chamber, absorbing and reflecting the surrounding landscape, causing the structure to seemingly vanish and transform its environment.

Desert X 2025

Coincidentally, I found myself in Palm Springs last week during Desert X 2025. This time, I had more than an iPhone camera with me, so I was excited to check out the various installations scattered around the Coachella Valley. Below are the ones I found most interesting, either photographically or conceptually.

To Breathe – Coachella Valley

In her installation To Breathe, Kimsooja creates a reflective space inviting audiences to intimately experience the desert’s fundamental elements—sand, air, and light. Inspired by bottaris, traditional Korean bundles wrapped in fabric, she describes this artwork as a “bottari of light,” achieved by enveloping the glass structure with a specialized diffraction film resembling woven textile. The resulting interplay of reflections speak to her ongoing exploration of universal interconnectedness, emphasizing the shared human experience through natural cycles and the invisible threads that bind us across cultures.

Soul Service Station

In Soul Service Station, Alison Saar reimagines the familiar gas stations of the American West as spaces of spiritual restoration. Rather than offering just practical services, Saar’s station provides emotional and cultural nourishment, inviting weary travelers to get “their blues flushed, spirits inflated, hearts charged, and souls filled.” Inside the station stands a life-size, hand-carved female figure who serves as both guardian and healer, embodying strength and protection. The installation becomes a sanctuary—a place for reflection, healing, and the honoring of collective histories and aspirations. Saar’s broader artistic practice is rooted in weaving personal and cultural narratives, drawing from spiritual traditions, mythology, and African histories.

The Act of Being Together

In The Act of Being Together, artist Jose Dávila uses unaltered marble blocks sourced from a quarry just across the U.S.–Mexico border, creating a dialogue between the material’s absence at its origin and its presence in the California desert. The journey across the border and the seemingly spontaneous arrangement of the stones evoke ancient ruins while hinting at future civilizations. The work encourages viewers to reflect on displacement, transformation, and the cyclical nature of endings and beginnings.

Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams

In Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams, Sarah Meyohas’ immersive installation merges analog and digital techniques to explore the systems shaping contemporary society by transforming natural caustic light patterns, typically seen at the bottom of a swimming pool, into an artful experience. Using innovative light-shaping technology, visitors can project sunlight onto a ribbon-like structure that cascades across the desert floor, evoking ancient sundials and nodding to 20th-century land art. Each mirrored panel, uniquely crafted by computer algorithms to manipulate light, spells out the poetic phrase “truth arrives in slanted beams,” blending technology with the sublime to create a captivating interplay of nature and art.

While exploring this year’s Desert X exhibits, I found myself continually impressed by how these installations reshaped not just the landscape, but the way I experienced it. Each work invited me to slow down, to look closer, not just at the art’s form, but at the intentions behind it. Photographing these pieces was deeply satisfying, but learning about the artists’ visions added another layer of meaning. Their explorations of identity, memory, culture, and the environment left a lasting impression. Desert X offers more than just striking visuals, it offers a conversation between place, people, and possibility. I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to experience it this year while visiting friends in Palm Springs.