desert X 2025 opens with artworks that speak to california's vast coachella valley

11 artists arrive to coachella valley for desert x 2025

Stretching across California’s Coachella Valley, the 2025 edition of Desert X transforms the desert into a living conversation between art, land, and time. Through eleven newly commissioned installations, artists from Asia, Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East engage with the desert’s vastness as both subject and collaborator. The artworks confront the weight of history embedded in the landscape while speculating on its future, addressing themes of Indigenous futurism, design activism, and the imprint of human intervention.

Some pieces take on solid architectural forms, asserting a presence in the shifting terrain, while others embrace the ephemeral, using wind, light, and movement to underscore the desert’s constant state of flux. In a region where wilderness and urban expansion collide, these works challenge perceptions of permanence, inviting visitors to reconsider the desert not as an empty expanse but as a layered site of memory, transformation, and resistance. The works will be on view across the Coachella Valley from March 8th — May 11th, 2025

Coachella Valley, California | image © Lance Gerber

monumental artworks draw from ancestral wisdom

From Sanford Biggers’ explorations of cultural symbology to Agnes Denes’ meditations on ecological stewardship, each installation for Desert X 2025 offers a distinct lens on the complexities of desert life in California. Ronald Rael and Cannupa Hanska Luger draw from Indigenous knowledge to propose alternative ways of engaging with land. Meanwhile, Raphael Hefti, Jose Dávila, and Sarah Meyohas examine the shifting boundaries between technology and nature.

At once speculative and deeply rooted, the works on view stretch across time — drawing from ancestral wisdom while interrogating the asymmetries of colonial power and the accelerating impact of emerging technologies. In its fifth iteration, Desert X continues to use the desert as a space of inquiry, where art reflects, reframes, and reimagines our relationship with the world we inhabit.

Kimsooja, To Breathe — Coachella Valley, Desert X 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

To Breathe — Coachella Valley is an installation by artist Kimsooja that invites viewers to engage with the elemental qualities of the desert — the sensation of sand beneath their feet, the movement of air, and the ever-shifting play of light. Known for her use of bottaris — bundles wrapped in fabric that speak to themes of migration and memory in Korean culture — the artist describes this work as a ‘bottari of light.’ By enveloping the glass structure in a specially engineered optical film, she transforms the architecture into a luminous prism, shifting with the sun and surroundings. Installed in Desert Hot Springs, the piece echoes its sister installation in AlUla, Saudi Arabia.

Jose Dávila, The act of being together, Desert X 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

Jose Dávila’s ‘The act of being together’ explores material density, gravity, and time through a series of unaltered marble blocks sourced from a quarry just across the U.S.–Mexico border. Inspired by Robert Smithson’s site/nonsite dialectics, the artist establishes a relationship between absence and presence, migration, and transformation.

As the stones traverse both physical and metaphorical borders, they evoke unseen histories and future possibilities, appearing as if splintered across time and space. Their casual arrangement suggests archaeological ruins in reverse — simultaneously remnants of the past and markers of an emerging future — inviting reflection on human transience within an expansive and shifting landscape.

Sarah Meyohas, Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams, Desert X 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

Sarah Meyohas’ completes ‘Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams’ as an immersive installation that merges analog and digital technologies to explore perception and light. Situated in the Palm Desert, the artist‘s work harnesses ‘caustics’ — light patterns formed by refraction and reflection — projecting sunlight onto a ribbon-like structure cascading across the landscape.

Inspired by ancient timekeeping and 20th-century land art, the installation features mirrored panels designed through computer algorithms, each inscribed with the poetic phrase, ‘truth arrives in slanted beams.’ As visitors adjust the mirrors, they reveal shifting projections, illusions, and patterns, evoking a mirage-like longing for water in the arid expanse.

Ronald Rael, Adobe Oasis, Desert X 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

Kapwani Kiwanga’s Plotting Rest stands as a pavilion-like structure that both evokes and challenges the iconic design language of Palm Springs. Suggesting refuge while offering none, the sculpture features a canopy of interlocking triangular forms that form a delicate lattice overhead. This open roof lets sun, wind, and rain filter through, casting shifting geometric shadows on the earth below. Drawing from the traditional ‘flying geese’ quilting motif — historically linked to the covert codes of the Underground Railroad — the artist imbues the piece with layers of meaning. Located near the Palm Springs Visitor Center, Plotting Rest becomes a site for reflection and quiet resilience, evoking the hopes and hardships of those who’ve migrated in search of freedom across generations.

‘Adobe Oasis’ by Ronald Rael is a sculptural demonstration of the revival of ancestral building techniques through contemporary technology. Situated in Palm Springs, the installation reimagines the potential of adobe — an ancient, sustainable material — through an innovative 3D-printing process.

Drawing inspiration from Indigenous and earthen construction traditions, the artist’s corrugated mud structures echo the texture of palm trees, referencing the enduring oases of the Coachella Valley. Set against relics of western expansion and modern real estate, Adobe Oasis presents a compelling alternative to environmentally harmful architecture, emphasizing adobe’s affordability, energy efficiency, and resilience. 

Sanford Biggers, Unsui (Mirror), Desert X 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

Sanford Biggers’ ‘Unsui (Mirror)’ is a monumental sequin-covered sculpture at the James O. Jessie Desert Highland Unity Center in Palm Springs. Towering over thirty feet, the shimmering cloud forms draw from Buddhist concepts of unsui (‘clouds and water’ in Japanese), symbolizing movement, transformation, and interconnection.

Reflecting sunlight and shifting with the wind, the sculptures evoke both the ephemeral and the eternal, mirroring the interplay between natural forces and cultural narratives. Rooted in the artist’s broader practice of remixing historical symbols, the work also acknowledges the history of the surrounding Black community, which was formed after the displacement of residents from Section 14 in the 1960s. In this context, Unsui (Mirror) stands as both a meditation on freedom and a symbol of resilience.

Alison Saar, Soul Service Station, Desert X 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

Alison Saar’s ‘Soul Service Station’ is a desert resting place that offers spiritual replenishment in the form of art, poetry, and communal engagement. Inspired by the gas stations of the American West, the artist’s station brings healing and renewal. At its heart stands a hand-carved female guardian, symbolizing strength and protection.

Inside, an assemblage of devotional objects and furnishings crafted from salvaged materials merge Saar’s transformative practice with community collaboration, including foil repoussé medallions created by Coachella Valley students. A repurposed gas pump plays poetry by Harryette Mullen, further enriching the experience. Rooted in Saar’s exploration of cultural memory, Black female identity, and spiritual traditions, Soul Service Station is a refuge for weary travelers, inviting them to pause, reflect, and recharge.

Swiss artist Raphael Hefti’s ‘Five Things You Can’t Wear on TV’ is a site-specific installation in Palm Desert that explores perception and immateriality through industrial materials. Inspired by his Alpine upbringing and later encounters with the desert’s vast horizontality, Hefti employs a black woven polymer fiber — originally designed for fire hoses — coated with a reflective finish.

Suspended in tension between two distant points, the material forms an artificial horizon, oscillating in the wind like a vibrating guitar string. This kinetic movement distorts spatial perception, mirroring the ephemeral nature of desert mirages where hard lines blur and reform. The piece transforms environmental forces — wind, light, and atmospheric shifts — into an evolving visual phenomenon, inviting viewers to engage with the poetic interplay of distance, proximity, and perception.

Agnes Denes, The Living Pyramid, Desert X 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

‘The Living Pyramid’ by Hungarian artist Agnes Denes is a monumental sculptural and environmental intervention at Sunnylands Center & Gardens, created for Desert X 2025. Integrating Denes’ long-standing exploration of pyramidal forms with her commitment to public landworks, the piece reflects both mathematical precision and organic transformation.

Planted with native vegetation, its structure evolves over six months as plants sprout, bloom, seed, and decay, embodying the dynamic interplay between nature and civilization. Echoing Sunnylands’ role as a diplomatic hub, the pyramid serves as a living metaphor for societal growth and imperfection. Activated through educational programs, it creates environmental awareness and collective stewardship, transforming beyond form into a social construct of care and engagement.

Cannupa Hanska Luger, G.H.O.S.T. Ride, Desert X 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

‘G.H.O.S.T. Ride’ by Cannupa Hanska Luger is a mobile, nomadic installation that expands his Future Ancestral Technologies (FAT) series, envisioning sustainable, land-based futures through speculative fiction. Reimagining his Repurposed Archaic Technology vehicle (RAT Rod), the artist transforms it into a reflective, camouflaged structure traversing the Coachella Valley, merging with the landscape while serving as both a mirror and an extension of the environment.

Constructed from industrial detritus, ceramics, and a tipi, the vehicle integrates speculative water and light-gathering systems, imagining an adaptive, resilient future. Visitors may encounter its time-traveling occupants — a family from an undefined future — prompting reflections on survival, Indigenous knowledge, and the relationship between humanity and the land. Rooted in the ethos of Future Ancestral Technologies, G.H.O.S.T. Ride challenges colonial narratives of extraction, urging us to learn from the desert’s deep-time wisdom and reconsider coexistence beyond human-centered infrastructure.

Muhannad Shono’s ‘What Remains’ is a site-specific installation for Desert X that explores the fluid nature of identity and land. Using long strips of fabric infused with native sand, the artist harnesses the desert wind as an active force, allowing the material to shift and tangle like dunes in motion. The work challenges notions of permanence, as the wind disrupts and reshapes the fabric, creating a landscape in constant flux. Suspended between gravity and movement, What Remains becomes a living relic — an ephemeral memory of place, displacement, and transformation.

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Ronald Rael, Adobe Oasis, Desert X 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

Sarah Meyohas, Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams, Desert X 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

Agnes Denes, The Living Pyramid, Desert X 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

Sanford Biggers, Unsui (Mirror), Desert X 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

Jose Dávila, The act of being together, Desert X 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

project info:

event: Desert X | @_desertx

location: Coachella Valley, California

artists: Sanford Biggers, Jose Dávila, Agnes Denes, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Raphael Hefti, Sarah Meyohas, Ronald Rael, Alison Saar, Muhannad Shono

on view: March 8th — May 11th, 2025

photography: © Lance Gerber | @lance.gerber