VENICE: The National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia invites you to come and cry.
Saudi-Palestinian artist’s Dana Awartani’s new installation “May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones” — curated by Art Jameel’s director, Antonia Carver, and Saudi-Iraqi assistant curator Hafsa Alkhudairi — has already established itself as a crowd favorite since the biennale opened on May 9.
Saudi-Iraqi assistant curator Hafsa Alkhudairi, Saudi-Palestinian artist Dana Awartani and Art Jameel’s director Antonia Carver.
(Courtesy of Alvise Busetto and the Visual Arts Commission)
“I’m honored to be able to have this opportunity to present my work on the largest platform for art around the world, but also to represent my community back home,” Awartani says. “I think this is the first time an artist from Jeddah, from Hijaz, has shown in Venice, and I’m glad I get to represent that side of Saudi. People have this idea of Saudi Arabia being very homogeneous. We’re actually so diverse culturally.”
The installation engages with cultural heritage under threat and extends Awartani’s practice to new levels. Borrowing its title from classical Arabic poetry, and building on the artist’s training in geometric art forms, the work, which takes up the entire floor of the pavilion, invites viewers to walk an imagined archaeological site composed of intricately crafted mosaics that reference 23 places — including sites in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine — each of which holds immeasurable cultural and material importance, recognized by UNESCO, the World Monuments Fund, ALIPH Foundation, and other public institutions that seek to preserve these threatened legacies. The sites’ shared motifs and traditions highlight common cultures spanning some three millennia.
“Mosaics arose in Mesopotamia and were adopted across cultures over centuries, including in Venice,” Awartani tells Arab News. “Material and cultural evidence demonstrate that our histories are much more interconnected than many appreciate.”
Dana Awartani’s work at the Venice Biennale. )Photo courtesy of the artist and the Visual Arts Commission)
The work is also a truly Saudi collaboration. Working with 32 artisans at a studio in the mountains outside Riyadh, Awartani sourced four differently-hued clays from across the Kingdom. The work contains more than 29,000 handmade clay bricks, baked under the Saudi sun; a combined effort that took more than 30,000 labor hours.
“The most important thing is that we were able to (represent) this cultural destruction that’s happening right now, in real time — which I don’t know if a lot of people are aware of,” Awartani says. “The work is a composite of many sites that are and have been under attack, and which hold significant shared histories that surpass contemporary borders. It is a response to the present — to what is still ongoing. We don’t want to ignore what’s happening. I can’t. It doesn’t matter where in the Arab world you are from, it affects us deeply in our lives every day. I’m happy I get to say that.”
“When we began this project, it was of global urgency,” Carver tells Arab News. “Over the past years that we’ve been working on it, its relevance and timeliness have only become more and more acute.
“And over recent days (of pro-Palestinian protests at the biennale), we have seen that the sentiment and themes we are sharing here is very much shared and appreciated by the global art world,” she continues.
The creation of the pavilion, she adds, has been “an extraordinary process — this truly collaborative way of working. And by working together — the three of us, but also our artisans and installers — we’ve achieved something that’s really beyond all our expectations. There is a huge amount of craft and skill involved in the work, and deep research and curatorial attention. But there’s also a huge amount of emotion. This work is really (exploring) the threat of loss of cultural heritage. And what that loss means. That can be an individual thing, but it’s also a loss for humanity as a whole. So there’s a true element of reflection and mourning in it.”
“The emotion that I want people to feel — something that I felt — is devastation,” Alkhudairi says. “Pure, immense sadness and heartbreak over these sites that are being erased. Stories, histories, people, our loves, our daily lives, our experiences — that is all going away. And we won’t get it back as it was — even if you get some of it back.
“But I also don’t want people to come out of this weeping — even though we tell them, ‘May your tears never dry,’” she continues. “We want people to come out of this really hopeful — hopeful for a future, for a way to preserve something for our children.”
Often, a visitor’s initial reaction to the space, Carver reveals, is “a kind of gasp.” That’s due, she suggests, to a deliberate decision to “create this moment of reveal over this field of optical effect.”
Guests tend to lower their voices and “take a moment to reflect,” she continues. “We’ve had many different adjectives offered to us by audiences — of the space being meditative, a space of reflection, a moment of pause. That’s something that we all need at the moment. And it’s something we’re really proud to be able to make happen here.”
The under-threat cultural sites referenced in her work “are not merely stones,” Awartani stresses, but “vessels that carry our stories and identities across time. I hope this exhibition highlights the urgency of preserving and protecting cultural heritage as a shared inheritance.”
