Palestinian-Saudi artist Dana Awartani recontextualises ancient craft and traditional motifs found across the Middle East, bringing them into the contemporary moment while also reflecting on its gradual erasure.
Read MoreDana Awartani was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 1987, to a family with Palestinian heritage. She studied art in London, graduating with a BFA from Central Saint Martins in 2009, and an MA from The Prince's Foundation (now The King's Foundation) School of Traditional Arts two years later. She is a recipient of the Ijazah certificate, which authorises its holder to impart sacred Islamic knowledge.
Awartani works across painting, sculpture, performance and installation. Her practice integrates patterns and techniques that reference and are specific to Islamic and Middle Eastern culture. She consistently engages with materials and designs associated with ancient craft and decorative art, reinterpreting geometric motifs and integrating patterns and techniques to create forms that are dense with meaning, and interrogate contemporary issues relating to gender, cultural destruction, and sustainability.
Awartani's engagement with materials, designs and techniques commonly associated with craft and decorative art—such as creating her own pigments and utilising traditional techniques in clay and pottery—is rooted in an understanding that such traditions are vulnerable to cultural amnesia. Across her practice, Awartani is intimately attuned to the materiality of the objects she works with and speaks to the histories of these ancient crafts. In doing so, Awartani similarly seeks to breathe new life into such practices and traditions, imbuing them with new meaning and bringing them into the present moment.
For instance, Awartani's installation Come, let me heal your wounds. Let me mend your broken bones as we stand here mourning (2019)—a series of dyed and embroidered handloomed textiles suspended in overlapping panels—is an explicit yet poetic reflection on sustainability and cultural destruction. The sheer fabrics were dyed with pigments prepared from around 50 herbs and spices specific to South Asian and Arab cultures known for their healing properties. Awartani later tore holes into these textiles to represent the cultural destruction enacted by Islamic fundamentalist groups since the beginning of the Arab Spring. She then darned each of the 355 holes by hand, to represent the painful scars left behind.
Elsewhere, Awartani's site-specific installation Standing by the Ruins (2019), presents a type and pattern of geometric floor tiles found across the Muslim world. Crafted with local soils and in collaboration with local Zawiya clay potters, Awartani employed traditional techniques to create mud bricks (adobe). Deliberately incorrectly tempered, the tiles cracked and deteriorated across the course of their display, in a reference to the destruction of built heritage across the Middle East.
Awartani has also explored performance in her work. I Went Away and Forgot You. A While Ago I Remembered. I Remembered Iʼd Forgotten You. I Was Dreaming (2017) centred an installation of coloured, locally sourced sand meticulously arranged on the floor to replicate traditional tiling of an old home in Jeddah. In a comment on the disappearing cultural legacies that have been erased due to modernisation, Awartani swept the sand into a pile, revealing a bare floor.
Dana Awartani has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah; Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Venice Biennale; Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Riyadh; Lisson Gallery, London; Sharjah Biennial; NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; and Jakarta Biennale. Her work has been collected by institutions such as the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE; Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai; The British Museum, London; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; and The Guggenheim, New York.
Dana Awartani's website can be found here, while her Instagram can be found here.
Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2024