Red Sea Museum Announces January Cultural Programme Highlighting Heritage And Contemporary Art

The Red Sea Museum is launching a diverse public programme for January 2026, offering workshops, talks, film screenings, live music and family events. Activities focus on the Red Sea’s heritage and its links with modern creativity, and will run across several museum spaces in Historic Jeddah throughout the month.

Through this January schedule, the museum targets different age groups and interests while keeping one central goal. The programme seeks to connect tangible, intangible and natural heritage of the Red Sea with current artistic practice. Themes include architecture, photography, navigation, travel literature, music, and the historical development of public health systems.

The month-long programme begins on Tuesday, January 13, and continues until Friday, January 31. Events take place in the Discovery Room, auditorium, Bab Al-Bunt Courtyard and other locations in Historic Jeddah. Each activity combines education and culture, encouraging visitors to explore regional history through creative and accessible formats.

The schedule closes on Friday, January 31, with a lecture that examines quarantine measures in the Red Sea region. Speakers will discuss how monitoring systems for public health developed over time along maritime routes. The lecture will also highlight Bab Al-Bunt’s former role as a quarantine centre for pilgrims travelling through the area.

Younger visitors are engaged from the very start of the programme. On Tuesday, January 13, the Discovery Room will host "Junior Cartographers," designed for children aged 6 to 12. Participants will learn basic navigation concepts and the craft of mapmaking through interactive activities, encouraging curiosity about geography, sea routes and exploration.

Photography heritage is addressed on Thursday, January 15, in the auditorium through the "Alchemy of Light: Albumen Prints" workshop. The session focuses on albumen printing, which uses egg whites and silver salts. Participants will examine nineteenth-century photographic aesthetics and consider how these techniques can be viewed and interpreted from a contemporary artistic perspective.

Attention then turns to the urban environment of Historic Jeddah. On Saturday, January 17, a talk on Historic Jeddah will look at traditional architecture and its links with heritage and modern life. Speakers will discuss how older building styles inform today’s understanding of identity, memory and urban preservation in the district.

The museum continues its navigation theme on Sunday, January 18, with "Navigation from Past to Present" in the auditorium. This workshop offers hands-on activities that track how navigation tools and methods have changed. Participants will explore artistic and practical exercises that compare early seafaring practices with modern technologies and mapping systems.

Film and music share the stage on Thursday, January 22. The auditorium will screen the animated film "The Menace from Above," giving audiences an artistic narrative linked to wider cultural themes. Later the same evening, Bab Al-Bunt Courtyard will host the Al Nour Wal Amal Orchestra, described as the world’s only musical ensemble composed entirely of blind female musicians performing using Braille musical notation, in a performance that celebrates resilience, art and diversity.

On Friday, January 23, an artist talk titled "The Gate of Gates" will take place in Historic Jeddah. The session will document transformations of the Bab Al-Bunt building and record human stories attached to this historic site. On Wednesday, January 28, the auditorium will host "Encounters: Travel Literature," discussing journeys to Andalusia and Sicily and the continuation of Islamic heritage through communities and places.

Across these activities, the Red Sea Museum positions itself as a platform for knowledge and culture from its base in Historic Jeddah. By combining talks, workshops, performances and screenings, the January 2026 programme links past and present experiences around the Red Sea, presenting heritage within contemporary creative contexts that are accessible to a wide audience.

With inputs from SPA