Dana Awartani Turns the Saudi Arabia Pavilion Into a Field of Memory
At the Venice Biennale, Dana Awartani has built a pavilion that asks viewers to look down before they look around. Her installation in the Saudi Arabia Pavilion, titled “May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones,” is composed of about 29,300 clay bricks laid across the floor in a mosaic-like pattern, with walkways cutting through the surface. The scale is immediate, but so is the subject: cultural loss, labor, and the persistence of craft.
The motifs in the work are drawn from more than 20 cultural heritage sites across the Arab world that were damaged or destroyed in conflict. Rather than treating those sites as distant references, Awartani translates them into a tactile, earth-toned environment that feels both architectural and fragile. The result is less a monument than a dispersed memorial.
Awartani, who is based in Jeddah and New York, has built her practice around craft as a living language. She studied at Central St. Martins in London, then pursued Islamic geometry at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts and later earned an Islamic certification in illumination in Turkey. In her view, craft is not a static inheritance. It can evolve, and it can still belong inside contemporary art.
That approach took shape after she began researching cultural destruction in 2018 and, in 2019, encountered clay traditions in Morocco. There, she was introduced to craftsmen who treated pottery as a devotional act. She became interested in clay earth bricks because they could recall tile while remaining visibly handmade, with the slight cracking that comes from sun and time. She later trained conservators to work in the technique.
The Venice pavilion is not her first large-scale project in this material. In 2021, she made a major work for the first Diriyah Biennale in Riyadh, a replica of the courtyard of the Grand Mosque of Aleppo. Awartani has said that piece was tied to her grandmother, who is from Damascus, and to questions of memory and displacement. The destruction of the Aleppo minaret during the Syrian Civil War sharpened that sense of rupture.
The Venice project also carried practical complications. War affected both production and shipping, adding another layer of urgency to a work already shaped by the fragility of heritage. Awartani has said the craftsmen who helped realize the pavilion were economic migrants in Saudi Arabia, underscoring the collaborative labor at the center of the installation.
In Venice, the pavilion becomes a place where material, history, and human skill meet. It does not try to restore what has been lost. Instead, it makes absence visible, and insists that craft can still hold memory with precision and care.
