The work is composed of two elements: an installation and a video. In the former, Awartani lays down a patterned floor using sand colored with natural dyes. In the latter, we see the inside a house of Hejazi architecture, a common style in the city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, before its westernization from the 1950s onwards, where she meticulously sweeps away a similar installation until it disappears completely. Besides celebrating and preserving the geometric art of Islam, the artist creates a radical relationship between time and aesthetic contemplation, ephemerality and eternity, in a powerful convergence of Islamic mysticism and issues of contemporary Western art.

Awards