In Interludes and Transitions
Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2026

Titled في الحِلّ والترحال / In Interludes and Transitions, the third edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale was led by Co-Artistic Directors Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed, bringing together 68 artists from over 37 countries across 12,900 square meters of exhibition halls, courtyards, and terraces in JAX District, with scenography by Formafantasma.

Appointed Associate Architect and Exhibition Designer, Sammy worked closely with the curatorial team to translate the Biennale's premise — the region's histories of migration, procession, and exchange — into buildable exhibition architecture across the Biennale's halls, from gallery sequencing to the display systems for more than 25 new commissions.

Human Brains
It Begins With An Idea

Covering three floors of Fondazione Prada's Venice venue, Human Brains presents more than 110 objects spanning the Mesopotamian and ancient Egyptian ages, the Italian Renaissance, and the Japanese Edo period alongside thirty years of imaging technology — tracing centuries of attempts to understand the human brain.

Thirty-two international authors were commissioned to write literary responses to individual objects, performed by narrator George Guidall; at the center of the second floor, thirty-six neuroscientists, philosophers, and neurolinguists appear across an assembly of thirty-two screens in a self-organizing installation, The Conversation Machine, produced with Taryn Simon.

Preserving the Brain

Staged in the Podium at the center of Fondazione Prada's Milan venue, Preserving the Brain gathered thirteen research institutes around a shared inquiry into neurodegenerative disease — from identifying therapeutic targets to the long path toward a drug reaching a patient.

Conceived by the New York studio 2x4, the exhibition divided the space into sections supervised by each research center around a common central area for dialogue, paired with a public program of online workshops held across the three weeks of the show.

Asteroid City

An exhibition built around Wes Anderson's film Asteroid City, bringing original props, costumes, and set pieces out of the desert-town film set and into Fondazione Prada's Milan venue — vending machines, a freight train, a painted backdrop mountain range, and the wardrobe of its cast, staged as a walk-through of the film's imagined town.

Palazzo dei Musei
Reggio Emilia

Reggio Emilia's civic museum is a place of living history, where dynamic installations shift as locals bring in their own objects and stories, working alongside curators to fold family memory into the collection.

Adaptable showcases tell a multi-layered story from multiple points of view: halls begin with the archaeological collection explaining how the city's geography shaped its earliest populations, then move through Roman, natural-history, and 19th-century painting galleries toward the upper floors and a view over the city.

Italian Pavilion
EXPO 2020 Dubai

What does it mean to build an ephemeral city within a city — one that rises out of the sand and risks vanishing unless it rethinks its own existence? The Italian Pavilion takes the tradition of ephemerality in architecture literally: the entire pavilion is shipped in by the boats that form its roof, then dismantled and shipped home once the event ends.

The pavilion's skywalk is clad in orange peel and coffee-ground composites, mycelium, and ocean-recycled plastics, incorporating local Dubai sand and passive climate-control strategies — engaging the circular economy at the scale of a national pavilion.

Swish Stool

Swish is a hardware-free kinetic stool built from 27 thin, rounded wooden elements cut from a single sheet and interlocked through individually designed junctions and hinges — no screws, no glue. It grew out of "implicit programming," a Carlo Ratti Associati system that uses digital fabrication to pre-program flat material to fold into three-dimensional form, letting the stool flex and shift under weight rather than sit rigid.

The design won Miocugino's spring 2016 open call for a hardware-free stool, and CRA's winning entry was released in open source — the CNC-milled files are free to download, so anyone with access to a mill or laser cutter can produce their own. Cassina later put Swish into production for its 90th anniversary. This project involved 3D model studies and prototyping as part of a group of three.

Floating Homes

Floating Homes reimagines domestic objects displaced by war and migration, staged inside a Gallo-Roman archaeological villa on the French Mediterranean coast. The installation sets everyday furnishings — a sofa, wallpaper, familiar textiles — adrift atop a floor of ancient mosaics, collapsing the distance between antiquity and the present displacement of Syrian homes.

The exhibition was covered by The National, situating the work within the broader story of Syrian displacement and memory told through domestic space.

A Story Unfolded

Despite lacking parks, squares, and other public spaces, Yarmouk developed a rich communal life through three distinctive settings: homes that stayed open to neighbors throughout the day, rooftops used for socializing and drying food for the winter, and street corners where residents gathered in a practice known as "Al-Tasweek." This last tradition — men young and old standing watch over their neighborhood — became one of the camp's most defining social expressions, embodying both idle waiting and quiet acts of belonging and protection.

Yarmouk Camp: A Story Unfolded pairs documentary photography with an illustrated narrative — Abu Khalil, a 75-year-old shop-runner — tracing daily life inside the camp from an ordinary morning through its market streets to a night-time celebration.

Serge Lutens 11:11 Campaign
Kufi Maze

From Nizar Kabbani to Imru' al-Qays: a carved object referencing Imru' al-Qais's 6th-century verse about perfume scattered in a lover's room, fabricated as a gold Kufic-calligraphy labyrinth for the Serge Lutens 11:11 campaign.