Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia. 12 Mar 2024
The Samstag Museum of Art reopened with a joyful launch of its Adelaide Festival exhibitions Dana Awartani (Saudi Arabia/Palestine) and Bruce Nuske with Khai Liew (Australia). It has been a significant absence on Adelaide’s visual arts’ landscape following a dramatic flooding episode that necessitated its closure for nine months in 2023.
With a lengthy title drawn from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, Dana Awartani’s I Went Away and Forgot You. A While Ago I Remembered. I Remembered I’d Forgotten You. I Was Dreaming (2017) is by chance, showing simultaneously in Adelaide and Maraya – the vast mirrored cultural complex near the desert town of AIUIa in Saudi Arabia.
In this performance-based, moving image work, the artist slowly, methodically sweeps up an intricately patterned carpet of sand, representative of the Islamic geometry of traditional tiled floors, historically a feature of that region. (In interviews, she cites a Buddhist parallel, in which sand mandalas are laboriously created and then ritually dismantled.) Intended as a symbolic commentary on the relentlessness of modernisation, it was filmed in Jeddah in an abandoned apartment building of the kind once occupied by her grandparents’ generation. Awartani, who was born and raised in Jeddah, where entire neighbourhoods are being razed, states she is not anti-progress; rather – as her practice demonstrates – she desires an accommodation of the old alongside the new.
Dana Awartani, I Went Away and Forgot You. A While Ago I Remembered. I Remembered Iʼd Forgotten You. I Was Dreaming, 2017, mixed media installation with sand and natural pigments, single-channel video, no sound, 22 minutes. Detail of video courtesy of the artist.
Viewable only from Samstag’s upper gallery, the presentation in Adelaide features the addition of a truly remarkable recreation of the original sand installation – approximately 8 x 4 metres of precise mosaic ‘tiles’ – meticulously constructed on the ground-floor gallery using stencils and multi-coloured (dyed) sand. (Art aficionados may recall the ceremonial destruction – with brooms – and subsequent transformation of Lee Mingwei’s Guernica in Sand at the 2016 Biennale of Sydney.)
Dana Awartani, I Went Away and Forgot You. A While Ago I Remembered. I Remembered Iʼd Forgotten You. I Was Dreaming, 2017, (installation view at Samstag Museum of Art, 2024) mixed media installation with sand and natural pigments, single-channel video, no sound, 22 minutes. Photograph by Sia Duff, courtesy Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia.
Awartani followed study at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design with a post-graduate course at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts – also in London. These formative influences cohere in a multi-disciplinary practice that addresses issues of cultural destruction, sustainability, gender, and healing in works, which range from sculpture and painting to performance and multi-media installation.
In a cultural context where figurative representation is forbidden, geometric compositions may assume symbolic and spiritual dimensions. “Sacred geometry plays an important role in my practice” Awartani has stated in interviews… “I use it a lot; it’s a combination of mathematics, science, spirituality and nature.”
Dana Awartani, I Went Away and Forgot You. A While Ago I Remembered. I Remembered Iʼd Forgotten You. I Was Dreaming, 2024, detail of mixed media installation with sand and natural pigments. Photograph by Sia Duff, courtesy of Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia.
It is not surprising to learn that the artist selected a broom as a less abrasive means of obliterating her Jeddah installation and it is this pervasive methodology – a gentle, yet innately loaded mode of delivery – which also imbues her animated, single-channel digital installation, Listen to my words (2020).
For this white-on-white digital installation, she couches compelling statements about the agency of women within a fine tracery of ever-mutating, geometric patterning, characteristic of the jali latticed screens, which are a feature of traditional Islamic architecture. Developed as an architectural corrective to extreme climatic conditions, it is also the kind of screening employed as room dividers in interior spaces, in order to provide privacy and security. Awartani makes the point that these screens – simultaneously practical and aesthetically pleasing – additionally serve a socially/visually divisive role, “marking the confinement of women within the domestic sphere and the impossibility of seeing them clearly.”
A succession of impassioned statements – just visible at the base of the screen – is derived from historical poetry by Arab women. In a darkened space that invites contemplation, these words have a heightened resonance. “I have been free all my life and in debt to no man.” Or, “I am a lioness and will never be a man’s woman”, to cite just two. Voiced on an accompanying soundtrack by contemporary Saudi women, this subtle work inevitably prompts questions about the status of women.
Thus, in a deft interweaving of poetry with her interpretation of (and research into) traditional Islamic/Middle Eastern motifs and techniques, Awartani has found an elegant way to highlight (sometimes uncomfortable) contemporary issues in quietly powerful works that are in every sense finely wrought. Notably, her work is one of several visual arts’ offerings in this year’s Festival of Arts that gives prominence to and celebrates the written word.
Samstag Museum of Art’s second exhibition Bruce Nuske with Khai Liew will be reviewed next week.
Wendy Walker
When: 1 Mar to 10 May
Where: Samstag Museum of Art
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
