Curatorial essay written by Laura Metzler for the Artist’s solo show at Maraya Art Centre.
The Silence Between Us is the first institution- al solo exhibition in the Middle East of Pales- tinian-Saudi Arabian artist Dana Awartani, and aims to delve deeper into her practice and her interest in connecting these traditions with the contemporary moment. Known for her focus on the revival of traditional craftwork and the thorough foundation and focus she has developed through her training in traditional Islamic arts. The artist invites the viewer to trace her path between darkness and illumination, among screens and poems, and to explore the dimensions and layers of meaning she had rendered across series; from the conceptual to the structural, from the traditional and spiritual to the social and the scientific.
On the most formal level layering is a strategy that is activated across all of the works. Layers function in different ways: physically, sensually, conceptually, historically, and spiritually, working with light and as such also with shadow and space to continually shift between the stability of craft and the tentativeness of their forms. Awartani’s renderings have the feeling of the familiar and the tradition of their methods, but also a delicate sensibility of something that could easily slip away. The artist honed this tension through training across different schools of thought; the conceptual sculpture program at Central St. Martins, and the craft study at The Prince’s School of Tradi- tional Arts as well as with her study in Istanbul with a master towards earning her Ijaza honor, a signifier of the mastery of illumination.
Layers are built up or suspended, they morph, distort or screen. Yet they also allow the art- ist to reveal and develop different threads that move throughout her practice. They allow a dialogue between genders, between the soul and the divine, between generations, and among nations. Layering marks the changing of time and the movement of ritual, evoking silences in history and societal memory asking us why those silences remain undisturbed and whether those silences are tense or companionable, or both.
The exhibition itself becomes part of the con- versation, starting and ending at the same point and becoming its own cycle. As the viewer experiences the work they move from darkness into full daylight before slipping back into shadow once more.
In this trajectory, the opening and closing piece is Awartani’s installation Listen to My Words (2018) which draws inspiration from the Jaali screens found in architecture across the Islamic World. They regularly were used in palaces and homes to both create privacy for the inner spaces and to allow air to move through the building by essentially creating a series of small wind tunnels. They are an important meeting point for the public, masculine space, the zahir and the feminine internal space, the batin and were mechanisms also that allowed women to see what was happening in the spaces around them but to be shielded from the male gaze.
The installation consists of seven screens, each with three, stretched, hand-embroidered silk panels that overlap and, when lit, come alive and combine to create an intricate, com- plete pattern inspired by the jaali screen. Each has a unique final composition, utilizing six-fold geometry that was inspired by the jali’s in Mughal architecture in India where the artist collaborated with craftsmen to make the panels.
Women’s voices move throughout the space, reading poems by female poets of the Arab world across time, from the Jahaliyya period through the 15th century, and across the largest geographic boundaries of the Islamic empires. Awartani ties these voices to the idea of the screens and their obscuring function, leaving the women faceless and anonymous as their words ring out.
Female poets have until very recently been regularly left out of the story of Arabic literary history and literary history at large, being the subjects of only a few anthologies and studies. As such much of the information and stories about the women themselves and the circumstances of their writing having long since been forgotten, ultimately ending up shielded not only from the literal male gaze but also the gaze of history, including that of generations of women who have followed. These poets have in essence melted into the screen and become reduced to its flattened interpretation. Contemporary Saudi Arabian women lend their voices to the piece, turning the installation into an impossible salon across time and space as the poems read out, and all are heard. The verses have a wide ranging scope but are largely empowering, focused on the agency of the women. It challenges the re- duction of the history of women to these archi- tectural features, and the sole reading of their roles through the ideas of visibility.
The following two, newly commissioned pieces carry on this conversation. In To See and Not Be Seen (2018) Awartani uses the same six-fold geometric pattern of triangles and hexagons, but rather than confronting the visitor directly as an architectural feature she inverts the pattern and renders the negative spaces in hand-blown and cut prisms of glass. They hang from the ceiling, what otherwise would be the interior space stretches down and capturing the light in an otherwise dim space. Rather than maintaining the perfection of the pattern, the work is lit at an angle, distorting the presence of the imagined screen and denying its form to take hold while still always holding the potentiality for its formation in the perfection of the calculation.
In Diwans of the Unknown (2018) the format changes from a single panel to shrink into three folding silk accordions that evoke folding books. Each is embroidered with progressing patterns and overlap, referencing Listen to My Words but without the finality of the framing. Across the length of the work the poems ref- erence in the earlier fade in and out across the surface, creating shifting, subtle imprints in shadows across the wall behind it. The work is an elaboration/exploration/extrapolation of the idea of the Jaali and what other systems are implicit in the historical silences but also provides an intervention on a personal scale, allowing the poems to literally illuminate the pattern and to draw the viewer beyond.
As the viewer continues the daylight increas- es, coming from a set of windows at the far side of the gallery, casting a gradient across the space and a contrast to the room that holds Listen to My Words.
Rather than continuing the conversation with the screens the work shifts to formal mathe- matical considerations in the artist’s Platonic Solid series, including five sculptures and their corresponding drawings. They reflect her strong traditional training in geometry and tra- ditional craft, the drawings being carried out in a methodical and meticulous manner with her own hand, and the sculptures through close collaboration with artisans.
The artist has rendered and reconsidered geometric forms that have been a source of philosophical speculation since the days of Plato himself. The forms are convex polyhedrons in which all sides and all angles are exactly equal, and are the only possible forms with this trait. Working with craftsmen in India, she has built the pieces physically with an outer form in glass, holding within their core their reflective partner shape, on copper wires, creating a moment of suspension across the five pieces. The sculptures also take into account the physicality of the materials and the traditions of geometric renderings, the centrepiece being made of handcrafted wood working, with the glass utilising tin welding techniques. Wood has a philosophical connection through geometric history, being attributed as the only material that needs each of the elements that are associated with each of the forms to survive; fire, water, air, and earth. The glass reveals this core but a tension and a freezing is undergone in this revelatory process through the internal contours of the copper, literally suspending the wood structure as they stretch between anchors. It creates an architecture of these layers and a form in and of itself, frag- mented through the hooks that they wrap into in contrast to the perfectly formed edges of the dialoguing structures. The patterns warp and stretch slightly as they all collapse in the shadows that creep across the plinth.
Facing the platonic solids, Awartani’s Untitled drawing consists of six panels, that grow panel to panel, starting with a simple circle in gold situated within a delicately drawn geometric skeleton. It is part of her Caliphates series that stems from her training with illumination masters in Istanbul, analyzing and documenting the development of illumination styles over time. She builds the structure out one layer, and one panel at a time, adding to each set styles, symempires. The core is gold leaf, which is the ul- timate foundation of the art and it shines as the natural light from the gallery window cross- es its path as the design becomes more and more intricate with each iteration.
The final piece, Love is my Law, Love is my Faith is activated by the daylight, facing the pair of windows that illuminate the space. This work was originally debuted at the Kochi-Muziri’s biennial in 2016 and is comprised of eight hanging embroidered panels in off-white, open in the center, slowly burrowing to a perfect square of gold on the last, solid piece through concentric cuts along each piece. The light funnels through and makes the gold shimmer, literally illuminating the internal realm of the work.
This work was inspired by Ibn ‘Arabi’s love poems the Tâj al-Rasâ’il wa-Minhâj al-Wasâ’il, which are acknowledged as some of the most important love poems in the Arabic language. He was inspired while circling the Ka’ba and drinking the Zamzam water by the overwhelming presence of God, and the deep love that carried with it. He left the great mosque and immediately set to work, drafting eight individual poems. Each one is an effort to capture the many dimensions and manifestations of this love.
The layers of the piece come to stand for each of these written works, and each layer is hand embroidered with a different form related to sacred geometry. The embroidery mimics the circumambulation of the Ka’ba itself, continuously circling the core, referencing the community that gathers there and the connection that is forged between and through one another, and that between ones soul and a higher power.
The dialogue between the internal and external echoes throughout the exhibition. The layering and the fabric block the light, literally con- trasting the outer edges to the open center. The viewer circles the piece the embroidery almost melts away and the movement of the light dominates the experience as the panels are progressively surrounded in deepening shadows and the exposed form appears that much brighter. It is a meeting of the external light of the sun, and the internal light of the divine before returning again to the darkness of the installation room and then exiting.
Each piece is a conversation between the geometric traditions of the Islamic world and the contemporary world that we all navigate together. Almost miraculously, Awartani gives life to dialogues that span centuries while evoking unity. In finding her own voice, she allows the viewer to listen, and to be immersed. The title for the exhibition comes from a poem by Mahmood Darwish entitled It was night and she was lonely. It tells of two people dining alone, separated by “two empty tables” yet joined in that connective space and compan- ionship that allows strangers to feel familiar, and for the familiar to feel strange. “Nothing disturbs the silence between us,” Darwish writes. “Nothing of me disturbs her and noth- ing of her disturbs me, we’re in harmony with forgetfulness…” Awartani asks us to consider this harmony and what and whom we’re willing to let slip away for the sake of it.