Dana Awartani’s show on Middle Eastern heritage lands in Bristol

In her latest show, Palestinian-Saudi visual artist Dana Awartani explores the weight of cultural destruction across the Middle East as both a physical and emotional loss.

This grief, alongside an urgent attention to preserving narratives, is conveyed through large-scale installations inspired by traditional Middle Eastern and Islamic art and culture — such as tile-making, illumination of texts, textile darning, sacred geometry, and the use of clay and sand.

Speaking exclusively to The New Arab about her exhibition at Arnolfini in Bristol, UK, Dana shares insights into her work, its cultural roots, and the collaborative processes behind it.

Farah Abdessamad for The New Arab: Can you walk us through Standing by the Ruins and your latest work of the same name, which recreates the tiling floor of Gaza’s ancient Hammam al-Sammara, destroyed by Israel in December 2023?

Dana Awartani: It’s about cultural destruction and loss in the Middle East, and acts of mourning and remembrance. Standing by the Ruins III (2025) is a new commission and part of an ongoing series.

I’ve done a larger one before, specifically on the Great Mosque of Aleppo in Syria, which was destroyed in April 2013.

This one looks at Hammam al-Sammara, which was the only existing hammam in Gaza, predating the 14th century. It was active under Mamluk and Ottoman rule before being destroyed in an Israeli airstrike.

Standing by the Ruins III is a replica of the hammam’s tiling work. Cultural destruction is not just bricks and mortar. When something that is part of your cultural landscape is destroyed, it is traumatic. You do feel a sense of displacement and loss as well.

Hammam al-Sammara is not just a hammam, but also a place of gathering for the community. I was speaking to someone from Aleppo who remembered when the minaret of the Great Mosque was destroyed.

He told me, “When I woke up the next day and opened the window, this iconic part of our skyline was gone.”

It’s the equivalent of Big Ben being destroyed, or Notre-Dame in Paris. And it’s a shame because when Notre-Dame was destroyed, everyone came together. In the Middle East, it’s hundreds of Notre-Dames.

The material is made of clay earth, referencing traditional adobe buildings — the mud structures that we find across the Middle East.

I collaborated with craftsmen based in Saudi Arabia, a group of them — Syrians, Afghans, Pakistanis — focusing on restoring ancient mud houses in Riyadh.

The traditional method includes hay as a binding agent, but I purposely left that out so that when the mud dries, the bricks crack.

The title of the work, Standing by the Ruins, nods to wuquf ‘ala al-atlal, a pre-Islamic genre of ruin poetry that comes from our region.

Dana Awartani is a Palestinian-Saudi artist born in Jeddah [Photography by Lisa Whiting]

How did you come across these traditions?

When I was in high school studying art in Saudi Arabia, I was only taught a Western canon and how to do a still-life drawing and a still-life painting with an easel and a board. I didn’t think about it until much later in life, asking myself: “Why are we not learning about art from our region?”

I didn’t know about the history of art in the Middle East, modernist and contemporary artists, or even the types of art like calligraphy, tile-making, illumination — none of that was taught.

I went to Central Saint Martins in London for my bachelor’s degree, and it was great because I learned about thinking critically, but less about making and using my hands.

I went on to the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts in London. It is quite crazy that I had to come to the UK to learn about Islamic art. I fell in love with the rigour of craft traditions.

What I try to do is to bring the modern and traditional together and use craft forms with every single piece that I do.

My work is generally collaborative. I work with Syrian refugees, with craftsmen in Morocco, India, and other places, which is a struggle because it is a slow process. It’s not like you’re mass producing, but it’s a lot more rewarding.

In your technique, you’re not only channelling Middle Eastern art and narratives but also incorporating cross-cultural elements, such as traditional Indian dyes. To what extent can this form of collaborative art promote dialogue and connections?

I work in this pan-Arab region because I am of mixed heritage. My father is Palestinian from Qalqilya. My mother is half-Palestinian from Haifa and half-Syrian from Damascus.

I have Jordanian nationality, and I was born and raised in Saudi Arabia. I never felt one specific place as my identity, and I found my identity through Middle Eastern art.

Geometry does not belong to one civilisation; it’s across the region, across religions as well. Historically, we weren’t divided by borders — we were cities in a wider region — so this is, for me, a way of expressing my whole identity.

I work a lot with craftsmen from the Global South. India was my first experience and exposure to textiles. I fell in love with the rigour of textiles there because their craft tradition is still very much alive.

It’s not a niche, and I think it’s important to work with craftsmen because historically, they were respected people in society.

For example, they received patronage from the royal courts. Now, unfortunately, because we live in a capitalistic society where everything is done by machines, craftsmen have become less important.

You can see them making cheaper, worse-quality crafts to sell in souks for mass production and tourists.

We should elevate these back to their former status because it’s also about empowering them.

I include craftsmen in the process of my work, and to see their work being shown in this context generates a sense of pride for both of us.

These geographies and crafts you speak about don’t obey the limitations we often impose on them.

I also look at it as a kind of resistance. Historically, craft played a role in toppling regimes. Before British colonialism, India was the largest exporter of textiles in the world.

When the British came, they broke all the looms, destroyed the hand-loom industry, and then industrialised northern England.

India then became the largest importer of textiles. But Gandhi told everyone: “Spin your own yarn and weave your own cloth” to rebel against occupation. I see that power in craft.

Susan Sontag wrote about the aestheticisation of war, of a ‘seductiveness of war’. What do you think about that?

The most important thing is the people and what’s happening to the people. Unfortunately, for a certain audience, they are just numbers.

You switch on the TV and hear, “Oh, 15 killed today,” “Oh, 800 killed today.”

They just dissociate from people as human beings. Ironically, sometimes I do feel there is more empathy towards buildings than people, which is sad. I try to approach that from a different kind of perspective.

Do you think about archives in your work?

With Come, let me heal your wounds. Let me mend your broken bones (2019), and previous work after the Arab Spring and the rise of Daesh and other groups, I started to archive and document heritage sites destroyed.

I pinpointed all the different locations. After that, I transferred the dots onto the fabric, tore the fabric, and then darned it to repair it.

This was the only thing I could do as a person watching all of this happening and feeling really helpless. It is a kind of cathartic act of repair.

The actual textile itself — silk — was made in South India. I collaborated with a community of natural dyers based in Trivandrum, the birthplace of Ayurvedic medicine, which looks at nature as a way to heal.

They incorporated natural dye techniques with Ayurvedic medicine. They boiled in hundreds of different spices and herbs with medicinal value, creating healing textiles.

Our grandparents knew how to mend textile, and historically, when something is destroyed, you fix it — you don’t throw it away. But now it’s the total opposite. We’re a wasteful, capitalistic society.

And I do believe, sometimes, looking back, we have answers for the future because the production technique is fully sustainable, and none of the dyes are toxic to the environment.

After mapping out all these different locations, I tried to find images of the buildings or sites post-destruction. I traced out the wounds in the images — the bullet holes, the bombs, the fire burns — and then darned them.

Unfortunately, it’s an ongoing series. Now, with Palestine, I’ve done a bunch. In Lebanon as well, Israel destroyed a lot of stuff on the border, so it’s an ongoing archive.

There has been quite a lot of pressure on Palestinian artists and voices, including cases of censorship. How can art institutions do better?

Arnolfini in Bristol is a good example. I don’t feel I would be able to show this anywhere else. Institutions like Arnolfini — giving me this platform and space to create works talking about Gaza, without having to censor myself — are very important, and I feel that shift is happening slowly.

I do not care if I am blacklisted by some museums. There are others. It’s their loss. History is watching, and people will go back and remember.

The exhibition Standing by the Ruins is on display at Arnolfini in Bristol, UK, until 28 September 2025

[Cover photo: Photography by Lisa Whiting]

Farah Abdessamad is a New York City-based essayist/critic, from France and Tunisia

Follow her on X: @farahstlouis

Dana Awartani’s show on Middle Eastern heritage lands in Bristol

Tags: