Goodwood Art Foundation announces ‘ERASURE’ featuring Dana Awartani
25 September 2025
From 22 November 2025 – 12 April 2026, ‘ERASURE’ will launch at Goodwood Art Foundation featuring Laís Amaral, Solange Pessoa and Dana Awartani. Presented across the Foundation’s two gallery spaces it will bring together three international artists whose work confronts the intertwined destruction of ecological systems and cultural heritage. Through painting, sculpture, installation and moving image, the exhibition deals with prescient themes such as deforestation, cultural extraction and the erasure of histories, inviting visitors to reflect on the steps we can take towards more sustainable and equitable futures.
Palestinian Saudi artist Dana Awartani will present I Went Away And Forgot You. A While Ago I Remembered. I Remembered I’d Forgotten You. I Was Dreaming (2017), an installation named after a poem by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. A geometric floor composition in coloured sand, recalling Islamic tilework and sacred geometries, is paired with a single-channel film of the artist sweeping away the work’s recreation in an abandoned house in Jeddah that was built in the European architectural style. It is a meditation on cultural destruction and the fragility of the natural world.
Awartani's multicultural background informs much of her work and her long engagement with the craft, history and traditions of the Middle East. In the current political climate, where cities, communities, and historic sites are once again under relentless bombardment, Awartani’s work resonates with renewed urgency. It stands as both a plea to protect the ancient civilisations of the Arab world and a celebration of its living traditions: the artistry of handmade craft, the medicinal knowledge of plants and the practice of mending and revering objects.
Curator Eleanor Clarke says “Building on our opening programme, the new exhibition features selected works which draw connections between external and internal landscapes. Amaral links environmental degradation to social marginalisation in Brazilian territories; Pessoa’s soapstone carvings merge bodily and geological forms; Awartani’s ephemeral installation mirrors cultural erasure. Together, these artists offer poetic and layered reflections on how cultural memory and ecological health are bound together, each essential to the survival of the other”.
Find out more via Goodwood Art Foundation.
Image: Dana Awartani, I Went Away and Forgot You. A While Ago I Remembered. I Remembered I’d Forgotten You. I Was Dreaming., 2019, Mixed media installation with sand and natural pigment, single-channel video © Dana Awartani, Courtesy Lisson Gallery
