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.