One of the most highly-anticipated cultural venues to launch in Saudi Arabia this season, teamLab Borderless Jeddah – a collaborative initiative between the Saudi Ministry of Culture and art collective teamLab – is set to open in Jeddah Historic District on June 10, 2024. Described as “a world of artworks without boundaries, a museum without a map created by teamLab”, teamLab Borderless is one of the world’s most renowned digital art museums.
Its Odaiba, Japan location received a Guinness World Record in 2021 for the “Most visited museum (single art collective)” that year. After closing that location in 2022 to re-open in Tokyo, it is still one of Japan’s most popular attractions. The company – which hails from Japan – now has locations in Macao, Beijing, Singapore, Hong Kong, Hamburg, Florida, and New York, and will also be opening in Abu Dhabi in the UAE. teamLab Borderless Jeddah will be its first location in the Middle East.
Leading up to its Jeddah opening, teamLab is working on numerous large-scale artworks, and has now unveiled the massive creative athletic space, Athletics Forest, alongside the co-creative educational project, Future Park.
Speaking about Athletics Forest, teamLab founder, Toshiyuki Inoko, said: ““Humans perceive the world with their bodies and think with their bodies. When you explore a complex, three-dimensional world with your own body, you physically perceive the world three-dimensionally and in turn your thoughts become three-dimensional. We started this project, Athletics Forest, with the hopes to enhance three-dimensional and higher-dimensional thinking.
Spatial awareness is said to be correlated with innovation and creativity. I grew up in a rural area and played in the mountains, but in today’s society and schools, the body is stationary. I think cities are surrounded too much by flat information such as books, TV, and smartphone screens. That is why we created a three-dimensional space that excessively demands the physical body. It is a space where people can perceive art with their physical bodies.”
Situated in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Jeddah Historic District, the teamLab Borderless Jeddah project is one of the Quality of Life Programme’s initiatives to develop and foster cultural and arts exhibition infrastructure, aiming to strengthen Saudi Arabia’s contribution to arts and culture, one of the kingdom’s Vision 2030 goals. Tickets are now available on the official teamLab Borderless website.