May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones
May 6–November 22, 2026
Italy
The National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia at the 61st Venice Biennale presents Dana Awartani’s May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones, curated by Antonia Carver with assistant curator Hafsa Alkhudairi.
Awartani’s most ambitious work to date engages with cultural heritage under threat. Taking her practice to new levels of complexity in collaborative process and material execution, it is the result of in-depth research into places of historical, material, and cultural significance across the Arab world that have been subjected to devastating damage in recent years through man-made conflict and violence.
The installation encompasses the entire floor of the pavilion, assembling mosaic references from across Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, whose shared motifs and traditions highlight common cultures spanning some three millennia. Visitors move through the work via earthen pathways—akin to an imagined archaeological site—encountering detailed geometric, floral, and faunal designs that are of extraordinary intricacy and material fragility. Without binding agents, the bricks crack as they dry, conveying the potential loss of shared histories.
This engagement with mosaics—a medium originating in Mesopotamia and sustained through Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and modern contexts—recontextualizes imperiled histories within a contemporary setting, speaking to a collective heritage that transcends borders—material and cultural evidence that demonstrates our histories are much more interconnected than many appreciate.
May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones is a plea to audiences to recognize those shared histories. The title borrows from classical Arabic poetry, where pausing before ruins is an active, contemplative act that summons empathy and solidarity with people who maintain a connection with the past and care for material heritage.
Created over more than 30,000 artisan hours, the work references the concept within master-craft contexts of “many hands”—a celebration of co-authorship and transmission of collective skill and knowledge. Awartani’s practice embeds collaboration as a recognition of the indispensable role artisans play as custodians of knowledge over centuries.
Collaboration is also central to the material, environmental, and conceptual development of May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones. The work emerges from the Saudi context—the 29,000 clay earth bricks were made at a studio site in the mountains outside Riyadh using four differently hued clay earths which the artist sourced from distinct geographies across the Kingdom before baking them in the sun. The ethos of “many hands” is also extended by contributions from interlocutors including Shumon Basar, Rachel Dedman, Uzma Rizvi, Amer Shomali, Dima Srouji, and Sumayya Vally. The collaborative thinking is furthered in a fully illustrated book—the first comprehensive publication on the practice of Dana Awartani—with contributions from Nouf AlHarthi, Saira Ansari, Uzma Rizvi, and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie. It will be available from Mousse Publishing in autumn 2026.
Dana Awartani said: “These sites are not merely stones, they are vessels that carry our stories and identities across time. The work is a composite of many sites that are and have been under attack, and which hold shared histories that surpass contemporary borders. I invite viewers to join me as active participants in a process of self-inquiry into how we think about cultural heritage, its destruction, and its preservation.
It has been a huge privilege to work with a community of deeply talented master craftspeople to realize the project. Preserving the intangible heritages they carry is central to my practice. I hope this exhibition highlights the urgency of protecting cultural heritage as a shared inheritance.”
Antonia Carver, Curator, said: “May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones has a real urgency. Building on Dana’s practice, steeped in both artisanship and conceptual art, it addresses a live situation that affects humanity as a whole. A huge team effort and the result of extensive research and close collaboration with master craftspeople, its slow, communal mode of making, centered in care and repair, resists mechanized production and aligns serendipitously with the theme of ‘In Minor Keys.’ We look forward to welcoming audiences to encounter a work that invites reflection on our shared responsibility as custodians of material heritage.”
Hafsa Alkhudairi, Assistant Curator, said: “Working on this exhibition has been a reminder of the power of storytelling, between us as curators and the artist, between Dana and the artisans and skilled creatives who helped bring this monumental artwork to life, and between the poets of the past and the audiences of the present. Transmitting narratives about our shared cultural heritage, we are urged to safeguard it physically, emotionally, and in memory.”
Dina Amin, CEO of the Visual Arts Commission, said: “The National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia in Venice creates a platform for leading artistic voices of our time and is an integral part of our support for the visual arts in Saudi Arabia across local, regional, and global contexts. A result of close collaboration across artistic, artisan, and research practices, this new commission is a collective achievement, which has enabled Dana to create a work that is significant and deeply meaningful in concept, intricacy, and scale. A result of deep collaboration across artistic, artisan and research practices it’s a tremendous collective achievement that thinks about our collective history as humanity, and the cultural legacy that we as humankind have left for ourselves and for future generations is incredibly important, and transcends borders, boundaries, and barriers. I look forward to welcoming audiences to experience the work.”
The exhibition marks the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s fifth participation at the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones by Dana Awartani for The National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia, commissioned by the Visual Arts Commission: saudipavilion.org
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