When you enter the Saudi Arabia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the first thing you’re struck by is the scale of the project: tens of thousands of clay bricks slotted together to replicate the forms in traditional mosaics, spread across the floor with walkways between them. If you’re thinking that this cannot possibly be the work of one person, you’d be correct.
Although Dana Awartani, a Jeddah- and New York–based artist of mixed Palestinian, Saudi, Jordanian, and Syrian descent, is the artist credited with the pavilion, she is the first to foreground the fact that she had numerous collaborators in the skilled craftsmen who labored alongside her in creating the project—all of whom are credited in a wall text.
Awartani herself is a skilled craftsperson. Her art training involved both a typical graduate program—at the prestigious Central St. Martins in London—and, afterward, a far less typical one: a course in Islamic geometry at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts followed by an official Islamic certification in the technique of illumination, which she undertook in Turkey. Craft is crucial to Awartani’s practice. As she puts it, “Craft is not a stagnant thing that’s stuck in time. I’m interested in how craft can evolve to be something that’s contemporary and used within the art world.”
History, too, is crucial. The title of the pavilion is “May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones,” and the sources for these motifs are not just any mosaics. They come from over 20 cultural heritage sites from throughout the Arab world that have, in whole or in part, been destroyed through human action during times of conflict.
The recent destruction of cultural heritage sites in Iran makes Awartani’s project all the more relevant, but the war also led to complications for its production and shipping. An interview with her follows below.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
ARTnews: The material you use in this project, clay earth bricks made in an adobe-type technique, is a huge part of it. What is the origin of your interest in it?
Dana Awartani: I’ve been researching cultural destruction since 2018. I was invited to the Rabat Biennale in 2019. In Morocco, they still have an extremely strong tradition of ceramics, and they make their own clay. I was introduced to a type of Sufi craftsmen who see pottery as part of their devotional practice. They sit every day and make hundreds of tagine bowls, as a prayer, because as Rumi said, there’s 100 ways to kneel to the ground and pray. Traditionally they add hay as a binding agent. I didn’t want that, because I wanted something that could look like a tile, but be made out of brick earth, and crack a bit under the sun. That was my first time working with the material and I fell in love with it. And I thought, this is something that was done in Saudi, but no one does it anymore. So I found conservators who do it, and trained them to be craftsmen in their own way.
Dana Awartani.
Anastasia Tikhonova/Courtesy Ministry of Culture of Saudi Arabia
And you began making work in this way, with craftspeople.
With them, I made a massive piece for the first Diriyah Biennale, in Riyadh, in 2021 [a replica of the courtyard of the Grand Mosque of Aleppo]. I thought of it as being for my grandmother, who is from Damascus. She has a bit of dementia now, and I was questioning the idea of memory. She left Syria a very long time ago; she doesn’t remember anything. When I speak to people who were from Aleppo, they say, we remember the day the minaret was destroyed [during fighting in the Syrian Civil War in April 2013]. It was so jarring, because it displaces you.
Working with craftsmen is important to you.
The core of my practice is working with craftsmen from my region, especially craftsmen who are not doing well economically or have been forcibly displaced. All the craftsmen we worked with on this project are economic migrants who came to Saudi. My dad was an economic migrant who moved to Saudi. A big part of preserving traditional crafts is supporting the craftsmen. Because a lot of these craft traditions are not taught in schools, universities, curriculums. The proper way to learn is usually intergenerational, and it’s taught from one generation to the next.
You have also worked with textiles. Why did you choose to do this earth approach for Venice?
It made sense to me to do a floor piece here, because you can’t really hang anything on the [brick] walls, and also we’re addressing a global audience here. Over the last few years, the scale of conflict has escalated, so I wondered, how do we think about cultural destruction on a mass scale? Rather than pinpoint one particular site, what if we looked at multiple sites? Then I started to home in on mosaic, and specifically the connections with Italy. Mosaic flourished here. The first ever mosaic was from Mesopotamia, then it flourished under the Roman Empire. Then there’s the Byzantine empire that came back to the Arab world. So when you look at Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, the Pacific, there was a lot of Byzantine architectural influences.
Of course, the Venice pavilion is a project on a much larger scale than the Diriyah piece.
Once we actually started to produce it, it was like: What the hell have we done? This is insane! This is three times the number of bricks I used then—aound 29,300 bricks.
Dana Awartani’s Saudi Arabia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Courtesy the artist and the Visual Arts Commission, Commissioner of the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia
How did you choose these specific sites?
In previous projects, I’ve looked at sites that were destroyed, but looking at the art of mosaic specifically led to these sites. And they were sites that were destroyed from as early as the Arab spring, and with the rise of ISIS, who destroyed things they did not feel matched their ideology, all the way up to what’s happening in Gaza and in Lebanon.
There are Islamic sites, but also synagogues and churches.
It’s not just pointing the finger at one group. It’s really manmade violence from all different religions and ideologies that are destroying and culturally cleansing. So we have mosques, churches, synagogues, and secular buildings. We’re not discriminating. These are all war crimes, whoever commits them.
I’d like to talk about the process and the production of this project.
The production, for me, is sometimes more important than the end result. It’s very slow and meticulous.
You started with documentation. Was it difficult to find documentation of some of these sites?
We had an internal document with every single site, saying when it was destroyed and how it was destroyed. For many, these are facts confirmed by international places like UNESCO. But because of the blockade in Gaza, the only confirmation we have for some sites there is from social media images and other images that are coming out, and local people sending images. For instance, Amer Shomali, the director of the Palestinian Museum, said, “Oh, I know somebody who has a photo of this.”
There is one mosaic that was discovered in Gaza in 2022, on a farmland. Somebody hoed the soil and discovered this underneath. It was immediately flagged to UNESCO, And now it’s been destroyed. It had a lifespan of two years in public, and then it was bulldozed, which is really horrific to think about. I don’t know why, but the thought of that affects me more than a bomb.
And then came the drawing and the design process.
Which was very, very long, because all of the motifs come from these traditional mosaics. Then the wooden molds. We found a workshop where there was a craftsman from a specific village in India who is known for woodworking. I worked with him to produce all the molds by hand.
Workers installing Dana Awartani’s mosaics in Venice.
Courtesy the artist and the Visual Arts Commission, Commissioner of the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia
And then the clay process.
We set up an impromptu clay workshop in the middle of the desert. We got the space, we got the materials and everything for them to come and work. We had around 15 to 20 craftsmen on site doing the clay. It was three months of work in Riyadh, not Jeddah, where I’m from.
Why did you have to do it in Riyadh?
The weather. For clay, you need hot, arid climates. Jeddah has too much humidity, and also you don’t get clay earth so much from Jeddah, because we [Saudis] historically built with stone there, but in Riyadh, we built with mud. We were lucky because the weather worked in our favor. It was winter, so it was a lot drier and a lot colder. We were always at the mercy of the weather. If it rained, we had to cover the whole site with tarps.
What were some of the difficulties of recreating the mosaics with clay?
In some cases, the original mosaic had an ombre effect. You cannot do that in this material. So, these are not direct replicas in the sense that they have to be redesigned to work within this material. For me, the animal images were difficult, because I’ve been trained in geometry, I know how to draw with a compass and a ruler, but animals can’t be drawn with a compass and ruler.
It would seem the situation in Iran complicated shipping. Your curator for this project, Antonia Carver, told me that originally the materials were going to ship by boat, to be environmentally responsible, but then that wasn’t possible, given what’s happening in the Gulf. Then the routing of the plane became very complicated.
I was checking where the missiles were going. I was thinking how ironic it would be if this project got destroyed.
The production of Dana Awartani’s mosaics in Riyadh.
Courtesy the artist and the Visual Arts Commission, Commissioner of the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia
How long did it take to install the pavilion?
We only had two weeks. We were working from 8 a.m. until 11 p.m. every day. We had a team installing, stations for uncrating, a team doing the dying. I re-dyed everything here on site with a natural oxide.
How did you organize the installation of all the pieces once you got here?
Every piece has a code. One of our friends, an archaeologist, said, “This is exactly how we survey. It’s like an archeological site. Everyone’s working really quietly, really slowly, meticulously.”
Dana Awartani’s Saudi Arabia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Courtesy the artist and the Visual Arts Commission, Commissioner of the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia
The way the pavilion is laid out, there are paths leading between the mosaics that are made of the same clay material. As you walk around, you are actually a bit lower than the mosaics.
Our archaeologist friend told us this is a big debate within her world: How do we decolonize the way we engage with sites? This idea of a platform looking down is very colonial. So I decided I wanted the viewer walking among the installation, rather than looking down at it. A lot of my older works are quite formal in the sense you stand at the periphery and you observe. Here I thought: How do we make it in a way that the audience feels like a part of it, where it’s inspired by an archaeological site, but it’s not a literal archaeological site? I want it to feel like it’s cut out of the ground. I want that crunching sound when you are walking—and the feeling of it. You get a bit of dust on your feet.
What do you hope visitors will experience in the pavilion?
Awareness of the cultural richness we have in the Arab world—just as much as Italy—and how important it is to protect it. Already I see that when people come in, they lower their voices. It was the same at the production site in Riyadh, because you could see the focus of the artisans working, it had a kind of meditative rhythm. So, I want visitors to the pavilion to have a moment of pause and to reflect. It’s not supposed to be a place where you just say, “Oh, wow, so beautiful.”
