Glenda León Campo de juego at BIENALSUR Saudi Arabia

The Cuban artist (Havana, 1976) will present her work Campo de juego at BIENALSUR, a global platform where her practice connects the everyday with the spiritual and the universal.

BIENALSUR: a global network of contemporary art

BIENALSUR was born in Argentina as a project that challenges the centralization of art and fosters intercultural dialogue through a network of venues distributed across different countries. More than a traditional biennial, it is an unruly map that connects geographies, communities, and artistic practices. Now in its fourth edition, the biennial spans more than 70 cities in 28 countries, establishing itself as one of the most extensive and decentralized platforms in the world of contemporary art.

Its arrival in Saudi Arabia takes on special significance: the Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art (SAMOCA), the country’s first contemporary art museum, will open its doors in Riyadh within the framework of this biennial. There, the exhibition Let’s Play, curated by Diana Wechsler with parallel venues at MNAD (Madrid) and SAMOCA itself, will be presented. Within this context, Glenda León’s installation will be one of the exhibition’s highlights.

Campo de juego: intimacy as a place of contemplation

In Campo de juego, Glenda León transforms a mattress—an object symbolizing rest, vulnerability, and silence—into a surface charged with sensory and spiritual meaning. By bringing this everyday object into the museum space, the artist proposes a paradox: the banal becomes poetic, and the private is transformed into a collective experience.

The mattress, associated with intimacy, here becomes fertile ground for introspection. The installation invites viewers to pause and reconsider the spiritual dimension of the objects that inhabit daily life. Against the accelerated pace of the contemporary world, the work suggests a pause: a space of shared contemplation where the domestic acquires an unexpected symbolic weight.

Between the personal and the universal

Glenda León’s career is defined by her ability to inhabit the threshold between the visible and the invisible, between the intimate and the collective. Her practice is nourished by formal experimentation, attentive listening, and sensory perception, creating a language that transcends passive contemplation.

León has built an interdisciplinary repertoire that combines her empirical vocation with a contemporary mystical inquiry. In doing so, she creates a field where the ephemeral and the eternal come into tension, and where the everyday becomes a vehicle for existential reflection. Her works invite participation rather than mere observation, shifting the viewer into an aesthetic and spiritual experience.

A sensory bridge in Saudi Arabia

León’s presence in Let’s Play within BIENALSUR reaffirms the power of her work as a sensory and cultural bridge. In a country where contemporary art is only beginning to open institutional spaces, Campo de juego symbolizes an invitation to explore intimacy as a universal territory.

Diana Wechsler’s curatorial vision fosters dialogue among artists from different geographies, and within that framework, León’s work stands out for the simplicity of its gesture and the depth of its proposal. Transforming a mattress into a collective meditation field is both an act of resistance against the trivialization of objects and a call to recover what is essential.

Let’s Play: an expanded curatorial project

The exhibition Let’s Play is presented simultaneously at MNAD in Madrid and at SAMOCA in Riyadh, with works reflecting on play, memory, and the ability of art to open new perceptions. For the Saudi venue, the curatorial team specifically selected León’s installation, highlighting its potential to generate an atmosphere of introspection and pause within a social and cultural context in transformation.

The inauguration of SAMOCA marks a historic milestone: it is the first contemporary art museum in Saudi Arabia, located in the JAX district, a former industrial zone now undergoing cultural revitalization. Here, Campo de juego will be integrated into a narrative that seeks to transcend the boundaries of the museum and radiate outward into the urban environment.

The everyday as universal

In Glenda León’s work, the everyday is never trivial. Her proposals transform simple gestures into metaphors of existence. The mattress in Campo de juego is not merely a domestic object: it is a reminder of fragility, of the necessary rest, of the passage between consciousness and dream. By situating it in the public space of a global biennial, the artist turns it into a collective mirror of our most intimate experiences.

In Saudi Arabia, this proposal acquires particular resonance, as it not only engages with a local audience but also opens a shared space for memory and contemplation. What seemed private becomes communal; what was individual is transformed into the universal.