High Winds and Irrepressible Joy at Desert X

The wind gusted so hard, as my family drew up to Jose Dávila’s sculpture The act of being together (2025), that it blew my young son clean over. The frequently windswept site north of Palm Springs is ideal for the work; as the nearby wind turbines churn, Dávila’s sculpture – 12 giant chunks of white marble, balanced in two-block stacks – is striking in its stillness. That these rocks migrated from a landscape in Mexico, hundreds of kilometres across the US border, only adds to the ostensibly formalist work’s conceptual poignancy. 

The act of being together is one of 11 outdoor installations commissioned for Desert X 2025, the fifth biennial to be held in California’s Coachella Valley. (A further three editions have taken place in AlUla, Saudi Arabia.) Organized by artistic director Neville Wakefield and Socrates Sculpture Park curator Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas, this year’s biennial – as with previous iterations – toes a line between tourist-baiting spectacle, social-media shareability and thoughtful reflection on the layered history, exploitation and natural beauty of the landscape in the region.

One hopes that it is not due to the recent turn towards censorship and retribution in US governmental politics that this year’s Desert X leans into abstraction and away from explicit statements of political protest. (Abstraction, as in Dávila’s sculpture, harbours its own coded politics.) Language, where it appears, is open-ended to the point of vapidity. Along the track leading to Alison Saar’s Soul Service Station (2025) – a twee tin model of an old-timey petrol station – are signs advertising: ‘When your soul’s running on empty, we fill it up’, though the work predictably failed to follow through on this vague metaphor. Three billboards by Cannupa Hanska Luger, an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold, incorporate wan phrases like ‘Dream is matter not yet created.’ The billboards are part of his Indigenous Futurist project G.H.O.S.T. Ride / (Generative Habitation Operating System Technology) (2025), which also includes a customized Volkswagen van.

On the day I visited, the road along which Luger’s billboards were sited was shut due to extreme wind conditions. More disappointingly, closed too were Raphael Hefti’s Five things you can’t wear on TV (2025) – a strip of polymer fabric stretched taut between poles 400 metres apart – and Muhannad Shono’s ephemeral fabric installation What Remains (2025), for which Shono considered the wind ‘a collaborator’, per the exhibition text. Instead, I narrowed my eyes against the blown dust and trudged up a curving path to the refuge offered by Kimsooja’s To Breathe – Coachella Valley (2025), a spiral pavilion of glass coated with a film that splintered light into glitchy rainbow refractions. Vast open landscapes such as the desert can be unsympathetic sites for sculpture; Kimsooja’s work managed to both enhance one’s awareness of space and foster introspection, even dislocation.

Miraculously, the wind had dropped by the time I reached Agnes Denes’s The Living Pyramid (2024). In 2019, Denes, now in her mid-90s, wrote in Art in America, ‘Most of my work is about helping humanity with one problem at a time, by offering benign solutions.’ In her art, which draws on philosophy, mathematics, biology and environmental activism, pyramids have long been symbols of human civilization: of social hierarchy and aspiration, but also of entropy and suppression. The Living Pyramid (a version of which was presented at Socrates Sculpture Park in 2015) is seeded with native cacti and wildflowers, which will germinate, bloom, wilt and die over the course of the six-month installation. A few weeks after the opening of Desert X, it was a riot of colour, an irrepressibly joyful statement of hope that also embraced the inevitability of death. To paraphrase Saar: it filled up my soul.

Desert X 2025 is on view in Coachella Valley, California until 11 May

^{Main image: Kimsooja, To Breathe – Coachella Valley, 2025, installation view. Courtesy: Desert X; photograph: Lance Gerber}