"May Your Tears Never Dry, You Who Weep over Stones is the latest realization of questions I've been working through for years: the destruction of cultural heritage in the Arab world, the fragility of material memory, and the relationship between craft, history, and loss."
"As these ancient sites are reduced to rubble today, the strength of Awartani's work lies in its directness: summoning heritage that will likely never be seen again."
"Traditional mosaics tell a story of transfer: They were invented in Mesopotamia, today largely Iraq; then they went to the Romans and Greeks, who helped the art form to flourish - you see mosaics all across Italy-and later they were brought back by the Byzantines into the Arab world, especially Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, where many ancient mosaics were used in architecture."
Dana Awartani presents installations at the Saudi Pavilion and Arsenale that address the destruction of cultural heritage across the Arab world. Her work transforms spaces into imagined archaeological sites using thousands of clay bricks arranged in decorative motifs derived from damaged or destroyed monuments in locations including Aleppo, Jerusalem, and Gaza. The installations continue research into the fragility of material memory and the relationship between craft, history, and loss. Awartani spent months researching mosaics from sites damaged by ISIS and recent conflicts, studying geometric, floral, and faunal patterns from locations like the Bureij Mosaic in Gaza and the Raqqa Museum in Syria. Her technique involves creating bricks from clay and arranging them at large scale, allowing viewers to walk through spaces that function as sites of remembrance for heritage that may never be recovered.
#cultural-heritage-preservation #contemporary-installation-art #middle-eastern-archaeology #material-memory-and-loss #craft-and-conceptual-art
Read at Artforum
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]