'Dana Awartani: Standing by the ruins' at Arnolfini, Bristol, United Kingdom
3 June 2025
From 28 June – 28 September, Dana Awartani will be exhibiting in her first European solo exhibition at Arnolfini. Standing by the ruins brings together existing works with a major new commission in a moving exploration of love and loss, destruction and the passage of time.
The exhibition features key works including Come, let me heal your wounds. Let me mend your broken bones (2024), commissioned for the 2024 Venice Biennale, alongside the new commission Standing by the Ruins III (2025). This latest work, created with a collective of craftsmen from Riyadh who specialise in adobe earth restoration, rebuilds the intricate Ottoman-influenced floor design of Gaza’s Hamam al-Sammara – once among the region’s oldest bathhouses, now believed destroyed by ongoing bombardment.
Awartani – a Palestinian-Saudi artist – addresses the physical loss of cultural heritage through the lens of abandoned, destroyed and vanishing places. Working across painting, installation, textiles, performance and film, she draws attention to both the human act of making and human loss, reflecting upon the ravages of conflict within the Middle East and architectural modernisation ingrained with colonial legacy.
Named after an ongoing series of floor installations and paintings, the exhibition presents three key moments: remembrance, healing and forgetting. Each work suggests a shifting relationship with the present and simultaneously with what is absent, rooted within a practice which Awartani describes as being as much about the story of how it is made as the finished work. Throughout, she honours traditional craft techniques – from darning to adobe building methods – working with skilled artisans and using locally sourced materials in work steeped in historical and visual references from Islamic and Arab art-making traditions.
Find out more via Arnolfini.
Image: Come, let me heal your wounds. Let me mend your broken bones commissioned for the Venice Biennale in 2024 © Dana Awartani, Courtesy Lisson Gallery, Photography by Samuele Cherubini.
