Dana Awartani

Dana Awartani (born 1987, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia) is a Palestinian-Saudi artist who lives and works between Jeddah and New York. Her multidisciplinary practice engages with the historical forms, techniques, concepts, and spatial structures of the Arab and Islamic worlds, bringing traditional modes of making into dialogue with contemporary questions of cultural heritage, identity, healing, sustainability, and destruction. Working across painting, sculpture, performance, and installation, Awartani places particular emphasis on historically situated and locally sourced materials, as well as on artisanal knowledge and traditional processes. A recurring element of her practice is the use of geometric patterns, which she approaches as both a technical language and an alternative genealogy of abstraction. Awartani’s work is grounded in an extensive study of traditional arts and crafts. She received a Foundation Degree in Art and Design from Byam Shaw School of Art at Central Saint Martins in 2006, a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in 2009, and a Master’s degree in Traditional Arts from the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts in London in 2011. In 2012, she undertook a manuscript illumination apprenticeship in Istanbul. Her training has informed a practice that combines contemporary artistic methods with techniques associated with Islamic illumination, geometry, textiles, embroidery, ceramics, mosaics, and architectural decoration. Rather than treating these traditions as historical forms to be reproduced, Awartani reactivates them through contemporary works concerned with the continued relevance and vulnerability of cultural knowledge. Among her most significant ongoing bodies of work is Come, let me heal your wounds. Let me mend your broken bones, developed from 2017 and presented in an expanded form in 2024. The series addresses the destruction of cultural heritage through textiles dyed with natural medicinal plants and spices in Kerala, India. Awartani tears and cuts the silk according to the forms of damaged heritage sites across Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and elsewhere, before repairing the resulting wounds through traditional darning. The visible scars become records of destruction while simultaneously invoking processes of care, repair, and healing. The work was commissioned for the 2024 Venice Biennale and was subsequently presented in exhibitions including Cure and Care at Manifesta 15 and Standing by the Ruins at Sfeir-Semler Gallery. This relationship between preservation and destruction was already central to I Went Away and Forgot You. A While Ago I Remembered. I Remembered I’d Forgotten You. I Was Dreaming (2017), a film and installation in which Awartani slowly sweeps away a geometric floor pattern made from naturally dyed sand. Created in an abandoned house in the historic quarter of Jeddah, the work reflects on the erosion of cultural identity and heritage in the context of modernization. Her more recent work continues this engagement with architecture, craft, and collective memory. Standing by the Ruins incorporates traditional earthen construction techniques to reconstruct patterns associated with damaged or disappearing architectural sites, while When the Dust of Conflict Settles uses hand-carved stone and other traditional processes to address the relationship between material heritage and contemporary destruction. Awartani has presented solo exhibitions at the Athr Gallery in Jeddah (2015), the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2017), the Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah (2018), the Samstag Museum of Art in Adelaide (2024), Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Hamburg (2024), and the Arnolfini and Towner Eastbourne in the United Kingdom (2025). Her work has also been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the British Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Lyon Biennale, Sharjah Biennale 15, Desert X AlUla, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the Jewish Museum in New York, and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, among numerous other international institutions and exhibitions. Her work is held in collections including the Guggenheim Museum, the British Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, TBA21–Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Sharjah Art Foundation, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Zayed National Museum, Art Jameel, Ithra, and other regional and international collections. Awartani was shortlisted for the Richard Mille Art Prize at Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2022 and for the High Line Plinth commissions in New York in 2024. In 2021, she received the National Cultural Award from the Ministry of Culture of Saudi Arabia, and in 2020 she received the Instituto Sacatar Residency Award associated with Sesc_Videobrasil. She has also held residencies at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and Delfina Foundation in London.