Hadith 540 tells of how the prophet would help around the house with chores: he tended the family livestock and “mended sandals and patched garments and sewed.” The following verse concerns love and the imperative that one outwardly expresses love to one’s brothers. The example the prophet set in the former—fixing and preserving—is tantamount to the care inherent in the latter. At the Arnolfini, Dana Awartani also expresses care through rebuilding, and faces down destruction and violence with mending and devotion.
The exhibition opens with three square floor works, Standing by the Ruins III (2025), adobe bricks of ocher, white, and dark gray, organized in geometric patterns reminiscent of an ornately tiled floor. A viewer who hasn’t been to the fourteenth-century Hamam al-Sammara in Gaza is unlikely to identify these as recreations of its washroom tiles, but a text pinned to the gallery wall informs us of the Palestinian-Saudi artist’s inspiration: once among the region’s oldest bathhouses, it was destroyed in 2023 by Israeli bombs.
Knowledge of this context adds a sense of anger and injustice to an already poignant sculpture. Several bricks are cracked or their corners chipped, their fragility and decay inherent, and are arranged carefully but with no cement, so there’s a looseness to the construction. This suggests impermanence and erosion, but not the program of cultural annihilation that consigned the original floor (and the rest of Gaza) to ruins: a reminder that the genocidal impetus entails not only the destruction of people and property but the erasure of memories, too. On the walls hang a series of complementary works on cotton rag paper, in which the floor designs are extrapolated as partially painted diagrammatic line drawings. Here, however, it becomes clear how the repetitions of the Ottoman-era design imply an infinitude beyond the material, bricks-and-mortar world; a sense of continuation.
This oscillation between grim mortal politics and something more metaphysical recurs through the show. In her video installation A while ago I remembered. I remembered I’d forgotten you. I was dreaming (2017) we see Awartani entering an institutional-looking room, albeit one with an intricately patterned floor: a repeating cloverleaf motif in pastel red, orange, green, and brown. The same pattern is laid out on the gallery in front of the projection screen. Both of these surfaces, it soon becomes apparent, are mimicries in meticulously arranged sand; on camera, Awartani slowly sweeps away the traditional Saudi patterning to reveal the duller, diamond-check western-style tiles beneath.
The video ends with the artist putting away her brush, and all that is left is a pile of sand in an otherwise unremarkable room. There’s a commentary on the eradication of traditional culture, and specifically how vernacular Saudi architecture is succumbing to the kingdom’s “modernization,” but there’s a mesmeric quality to how Awartani sweeps, a physical prayer in which illusion is swept away to reveal what lies beyond. The symbolism is moving, especially in the context of a largely secular contemporary art world.
These meditative, small gestures are apparent even in the largest installation of the show, Come, let me heal your wounds. Let me mend your broken bones (2024), a series of monumental yellow-and-orange sheer silk screens that hang from the ceiling. Here, as in the work’s debut at the 60th Venice Biennale, the gallery lights flood through the material, patterning the floor with shadows (I’d love to see the work in natural light). Given the scale of the installation, it would be easy to miss the tiny darned cotton patches in the same color as the surrounding planes. These marks are replicated on a series of small, wall-hanging works in which the same sheer fabric is stretched on a frame.
Each of these works are accompanied by an identically sized panel which, in typewriter font, annotates the name of a historical landmark, its location, its date of destruction and, if known, the perpetrator and motive. “Tetrapylon, Palmyra, Syria,” reads one, referring to the four third-century columns destroyed by Isis in 2015 in a further act of cultural cleansing; another reads “Mar Sleeva Church, Tel Talaa, Syria,” which was blown up by Isis later the same year. These ancient sites of pilgrimage are not coming back, any more than the Hamam al-Sammara. Awartani’s works might be read as memorials to what is irrevocably lost, but in her stitching and darning—little acts of love and defiance—she goes further: these are modes of preservation through recreation.
