Dana Awartani Lays a Map of Cultural Survival

Drawing on endangered craft traditions and damaged heritage sites across the Middle East, Dana Awartani arranges 29,000 handmade clay bricks into a meditation on cultural loss. Allard van Hoorn examines the artist’s installation for the Saudi Arabia Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale.

Palestinian by heritage, Jordanian by nationality, born and raised in Saudi Arabia, with family ties to Lebanon and Syria, Dana Awartani describes her sense of self as Levantine and Arab, transcending any single nation. Her understanding of her own identity, she says, crystallised not in childhood but through her art education, when she first encountered the canon of sacred arts – Islamic art from the Arab world that transcends borders, the idea of the nation-state, and, ultimately, all influences that formed her identity before encountering the arts altogether.

We are in Venice’s Arsenale, in a room with more than twenty-nine thousand handmade bricks. The work is itself a cultural heritage site in the making: adobe in idea, but without the sand and hay that traditionally bind and strengthen the clay. It is potentially as fragile as all the conflict-destroyed or threatened mosques, cathedrals, monasteries, churches and synagogues that are sign-posted in this room. This is a place where warning signs gather – sites of invaluable cultural significance that are threatened with extinction, but also the knowledge of the craftspeople that create them. The makers are displaced by ongoing conflict, unable to practice their craft and thus at risk of losing the knowledge of their production skills. This is a place of mourning, creation, re-creation and humanity, or rather, a test ground for its survival.

What follows is a map without borders, a tapestry of purposely homogenised style of hand-made new artefacts. It is like one of those giant carpets where you jump from island to island, avoiding threats of dragons or lava as a child, but we are not children anymore. We now must decide which direction we take within this map. One signpost points at ignorance and oblivion. Another points towards deep understanding and learning from a dehumanising, destructive force that has come over us, seeing beauty in difference as a danger, leading to subjugation and a death-threat to diversity. One can feel it in the room. People enter and weep. Loss, hope, overwhelming splendour through millennia of tradition and (re-)formation of significance, puzzled together in this giant emotional jigsaw.

May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones, reads the title of the work, a line by classical Arabic poet Abu Nawas, criticising people who cry over ruins, not people. Awartani likes this line because she completely disagrees with it. Without the heritage, there are no people. Erasing heritage erases the people, their identity, their visual language to express their diversity, their skills, and their understanding of belonging and becoming. “The starting point for me for this project was looking at a lot of ancient UNESCO heritage sites that had Byzantine mosaics and the relationship between the East and the West, in terms of that cultural exchange,” explains Awartani. “Mosaic, it turns out, was created in Mesopotamia, came to Europe, and under the Roman and Greek empires flourished as an art form. And then the Byzantines brought it back to the Middle East when they conquered parts of the Arab world, so it is a sharing of heritage and culture.” It is a sharing of heritage and culture. This room is not a map of Arab history; the West is ingrained here, in complicity and culture, as much as the imperfect patterns with their dust and tears and cracks – a void of our collective dreams and shame. Shame imposed, shame received, shame felt.

Craft is resistance. For Dana, working with craftsmen to recreate what has been deliberately destroyed is resistance on multiple levels. It is a refusal to let cultural erasure – whether by ISIS or by the Israeli military – succeed. But she places this in a longer historical lineage: the suffragette movement using patchwork as political speech; Gandhi instructing Indians to spin their own yarn and weave their own cloth to undermine the British economy. Even now, in Gaza, people are building mud houses from ancestral knowledge because there is no cement. Craft, she argues, is also survival technology. It is also, implicitly, a resistance to capitalism. Craft cannot be mass-produced without becoming unethical. It does not scale. In this, it refuses the logic of a system that, in her view, has built cities for capital rather than for human beings. These historic pulses pop up in place and time as the mycorrhizal networks of mycelium, nurturing and balancing the output above the surface, communicating, feeding, repairing, recycling. This surfacing medley of destruction connects to many places thousands of miles away, all interconnected by a human drive for identity.

Awartani leaves us here to wonder and to mourn. To contemplate our collective histories, our collective destructions, our collective culturecide. It asks us where we stand as our gaze is minced over a minefield of loss that is this room. Who will we be going forward, now that we have been in this place, now that our tears are drying over these stones?