Dana Awartani (b. 1987)
Featured in 'Erasure' - Open from 22 November 2025
Palestinian Saudi artist Dana Awartani presents I Went Away And Forgot You. A While Ago I Remembered. I Remembered I’d Forgotten You. I Was Dreaming (2017), a multi-media installation named after a poem by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Presented in the Pigott Gallery, a geometric floor composition meticulously constructed in coloured sand is paired with a single-channel film which shows the artist sweeping away the work’s recreation inside an abandoned Jeddah house, built in the European architectural style. This work celebrates traditional Islamic design and sacred geometry while exploring the cycle of creation and destruction.
Artist
Winter Exhibition 2025
In the current political climate, where cities, communities, and historic sites are once again under relentless bombardment, this 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.
Awartani’s work invites us to reflect on the value of the artforms, architecture, and cultural practices that shape our shared heritage.
About the artist
Born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Dana Awartani lives and works between Jeddah and New York. Although she spent most of her life in Saudi Arabia, she has Palestinian, Syrian and Jordanian heritage. This multicultural background informs much of her work and her long engagement with the craft, history and traditions of the Middle East.
At the heart of Awartani’s work lies sacred geometry, a visual language that transcends geography, religion, and culture, and which she embraces as a unifying thread across the diverse identities of her heritage. Spanning painting, sculpture, performance and installation, Awartani’s commitment to historically situated and locally sourced materials lends a rare sensitivity to urgent political concerns of gender, healing, cultural destruction and sustainability.
Her practice draws on both contemporary and traditional modes of making and thinking, while engaging in critical reinterpretations of its forms and techniques. At Central Saint Martins, she was trained in a conceptual and theoretical framework but found herself drawn to the tangible processes and material rigour of craft traditions. This led her to the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts for her MA, where she studied traditional art forms and disciplines, such as sacred geometry, manuscript illumination, and pigment-making from natural sources. Her ongoing training with a master manuscript illustrator in Istanbul has further solidified her appreciation for the discipline and history of traditional crafts.
Following on from her celebrated commission at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Awartani has received significant international recognition. Her first UK presentation at the Arnolfini, Bristol closes on 28 September 2025.
Artist
Winter Exhibition 2025
