‘It’s important to talk about these things’: exhibition highlights destroyed Middle Eastern heritage sites – The Guardian

9 July 2025

The exhibition is bright, beautiful and melancholy: an exploration of the loss of cultural and heritage sites in the Middle East destroyed by conflict and unsympathetic development.

Standing by the Ruins, a show by the Palestinian-Saudi artist Dana Awartani includes a recreation of an ancient bathhouse floor in Gaza believed to have been destroyed in Israeli attacks.

Another highlight of the exhibition, which has opened in Bristol, is a room dominated by billowing sheets of colourful silk representing a map of the Middle East with cultural sites that have been lost pinpointed by rips in the fabric.

A third space at the Arnolfini on Bristol’s harbourside features a recreation of another floor, this one appearing to be made of the sort of tiles typically found in the old quarter of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. Actually, it is made out of sand, a reminder of the fragility of such features as the buildings they are housed in are knocked down or modernised.

Dana Awartani has a diverse background. Her father is Palestinian while her mother is Palestinian and Syrian. Awartani was born and raised in Saudi Arabia and has Jordanian nationality.

She said the work in her exhibition, her first solo public gallery show in Europe, was inspired by the “strange dichotomy” of some countries in the Gulf booming while places such as Syria and Palestine were “obliterated”.

Read in full via The Guardian here.