Artworks in this year’s biennial, scattered around the Palm Springs area, explore issues of land rights, water supply and more. In the foothills near the Palm Springs Visitors Center, Nicholas Galanin has mimicked L.A.’s famous Hollywood Sign with “Never Forget,” which references the colonization of ancestral Cahuilla territory. The undulating Pop installation of the word “Indianland” acknowledges the Hollywood Sign’s original form, erected as a real estate gimmick to promote the colonization of Beachwood Canyon. Built by Mexican laborers in two months during 1923, it is an accidental icon. Today, the city’s most prominent landmark is also a symbol of the entertainment industry; but “Hollywoodland“ was never designed to be anything other than an advertisement for a housing development on the side of a steep hill. People from around the world project their own dreams and fantasies onto it. In this way, it makes a perfect “empty vessel” to use as a springboard for the show’s most Instagram-ready work, which is both a strength and a weakness: strong because the virtual image will travel far and wide, weak because seeing it reproduced on a cellphone screen is actually more impactful than encountering the analog object at the site (much like the sign it mimics.) That said, the artist does point out that the sign itself is less significant than the land it sits on, and the history of who engages with that. A related, somewhat reversed issue hampers Xaviera Simmons’ string of billboards along Gene Autry Trail, a busy thoroughfare between the city and Interstate 10. Her image-and-text articulations of the pressing topic of reparations and redistribution of wealth are thought-provoking. But billboards aren’t designed for the paragraph-length typography found on several of them, which simply cannot be read at 55 mph.

Desert X is open until May 16.