Artist Dana Awartani: On Art and Heritage

Join artist Dana Awartani and Hirshhorn curator Marina Isgro to explore how memory can help us remember our past and shape our future.

Awartani is a Saudi-Palestinian artist whose work engages the complexity of Arab cultural heritage, often through practices associated with traditional craft. Her two-part installation I went away and forgot you. A while ago I remembered. I remembered I’d forgotten you. I was dreaming (2017) is on view in Put It This Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection at the Museum through Fall 2023.

In it, a floor mosaic made of sand accompanies a large video projection of the artist sweeping away a similar sand installation in an abandoned home in Jeddah. Her gestures illustrate the slow layering of history and its erasure, whereby cultural identity becomes increasingly unstable. Through her art, she calls for a contemporary identity built alongside careful attention to the past.