The Ground Day Breaks
A solo exhibition by Muhannad Shono
curated by Nat Muller, ATHR Gallery (Riyadh), 2024
For his solo exhibition, “The Ground Day Breaks”, Muhannad Shono uses reclaimed black foundry sand as his primary material. Used in foundries to create moulds, this carbonised, fired, sand gives shape to things up to the point that it becomes depleted and unsuitable to use. Foundry sand is one of the few uses for desert sand, it cannot be used for construction, which relies on imports. The artist repurposes a worn-out industrial material and returns the grain to its imaginary potential, which defies categorisation and functionality. The grains rebelliously refuse to be set into a fixed form, rather they flow in and out of it. They wrestle themselves loose, coagulate into a shape and then break free again.
In “The Ground Day Breaks” the grain of sand speaks back and becomes a substance of the imagination. It speaks to us at a time of great global ecological uncertainty and regional political turmoil, as well as at a time of accelerated social change in Saudi Arabia. This makes for an exhibition that is both topical and poetic. It touches on themes recurrent in Shono’s work, like renewal; the wielding of the line as a conceptual and aesthetic device; tensions between the built and natural environment; and narrative as a tool for worldbuilding. Distinctive to this project is how materials research and the development of innovative techniques allow for the restive quality of the grain to be unleashed. Material practice becomes speculative practice.
Everything derives from, and eventually returns to, the grain.
A grain of sand contains multitudes. Shaped by erosion, the elements, and time — lots of it, this tiny particle plays a seminal role in the infrastructure of modern life: from the concrete used in construction, the glass in light bulbs, the asphalt we drive on, to the quartz used in microchips for our digital devices. Without sand, our cities would crumble. Sand is also the defining feature of the natural landscape in the Arabian Peninsula. Its windswept dunes an ancient, rich and varied ecosystem stands as a counterpoint, perhaps, to the brevity of human life on this planet. “Sand is both minuscule and infinite, a means of measurement and a substance beyond measuring,” writes Vince Beiser in his book The World in a Grain (2018). Beiser not only refers to volume here, but also to the boundless applications of sand: it is endlessly mixed, bonded, crushed, heated, and manipulated into purpose. Sand is infinite in its power to remake itself. In its natural form, when resting on the seabed, the desert plains, or simply the ground we walk on, sand makes up the very foundation on which life takes place. A grain of sand, then, is a small but big thing: an agent of transformation that yields incessant possibility.
A Promise of Breaking
carbon on paper
Equally forceful is the series of works on paper, “A Promise of Breaking”, on which we see the actual carbon transfer of the block’s breakage. These “impact prints” record the moment of dissolution and map a topography of destruction. Still, this premise is tentative, as the title suggests. What has exactly been broken? Where do these maps take us? What do they pledge? There is nothing we can recognise as the grain as such here. These works show sharp lines, smudges, angular shapes, specks of pigment, the contours of the block only faintly coming through like a shadow. A Promise of Breaking has a haunting sensibility to it, propelled by the absent presence of the grain. The grain here is a lingering memory that wants to return to its material form, and yet it cannot. But this series is also very much about movement: nothing is fixed, nothing is static. Sand, or at least its shadow, becomes mobile, fluid, and transformative.
Night Dew
paper, carbon paper, lightbox
In “Night Dew”, a series of lightboxes containing carbon paper on which the artist has used a stippling technique, the grain is reproduced from memory. Ephemeral and dreamlike, both the fragility of the carbon paper and the illumination of the lightbox enhance the ghostly trails of the grain. With every dot applied to the paper, past and future, day and night enmesh, as if the lifeworld of the grain can only exist between impeding darkness and tomorrow’s light. These spectral traces are dispersed across the paper like slumbering seeds waiting to germinate. Night Dew suggests that the dark feeds dawn, rather than feeds on it.
Seedlings
carbon on paper
The work’s twin, “Seedlings”, the carbon transfer of the stippling on paper, proffers something more robust. Here the grain blooms organically, feverishly trying to outgrow the frame and escape its form. It seeds and becomes spore-like and strange. It reminds us how elemental sand is for horticulture. If this exhibition is suffused with agricultural terminology, then this is because something is indeed being cultivated and willed to grow. In these two projects we feel the artist’s hand most present, as if he were animating the grain.
Whereas Night Dew draws on latent possibility, Seedlings brims with determined energy. They are, after all, each other’s flipsides. But they also tell us something about how the individual grain behaves vis-à-vis the collective. Look closely and you can distinguish each dot, stand further away and different patterns start to emerge.
What Remains
reclaimed sand, resin
While renewal lies at the heart of this exhibition, in which a new day can break ground, it is not without violence and loss. This is, however, never absolute, and even through the rubble something generative can be found. If “From the Land” purports healing, then “What Remains” can be seen as the wound. Here we find the cut and the rupture: this is the moment everything changes. Blocks of sand have been broken on the floor or on the brown side of carbon paper, a colour reminiscent of desert sand, then the pieces are centred towards the greatest point of impact. This is material smashed to bits on a hard surface, but it also indicates how matter always retains a memory of its former whole self when broken. Here too it is unclear whether the grains want to dissolve further or come back into formation.
From the Land
reclaimed sand, resin
Shono’s oeuvre has for many years drawn on the motif of Al-Khidr, or the Verdant One. This mythological figure, known across Abrahamic traditions, is connected to the greening of nature and rebirth. In “From the Land”, the spirit of Al-Khidr manifests itself through a series of sculptures. Beds of sand are sprayed at intervals with resin as if they were irrigated. Once hardened, “skins” are peeled from the surface, creating brittle bark-like shapes that come from the land. Their irregular forms resemble otherworldly mushrooms reaching skywards or vessels anticipating cargo. In many ways these scabs of earth suggest healing, as if a protective dermis were lifted from the land and now stands between ground and firmament, and between scar and wound. These sculptures with their jagged edges also expand time. They look like archaeological artefacts or fossils excavated from an unknown past, as much as they could be extra-terrestrial. Remarkably, they have been birthed by a burial. The artist spent months scattering layers of sand upon layer, before harvesting these shapes. Alien and wonderful, these objects are decidedly grounded, but still, they do not seem to belong.
Folding Grounds
reclaimed sand, gauze, resin
This shapeshifting and mutable characteristic comes to the fore in “Folding Grounds” where large strips of coagulated sand are suspended from the gallery’s ceiling or draped into form. This work flows upwards and engages the viewer’s eye vertically. It emphasises the structuring and structural properties of the material, which harks back to how sand is used for construction. But rather than rigid towering builds, here the pliability of the material is key. There is a softness to these formations akin to textiles. Whether shroud, garment, or carpet the sand in Folding Grounds intends to provide comfort and shelter and inspire aspiration rather than veneration.
The Ground Day Breaks
reclaimed sand, resin
Throughout the exhibition reclaimed sand features as a granular agent of change. This is most palpable in the exhibition’s titular piece, The Ground Day Breaks, a large-scale site-specific installation consisting of approximately 2000 handcrafted sculptures arranged in a radial pattern. Few artists manage to marry monumentality with tenderness and poetic sophistication. This is exactly what Shono achieves in this intervention. Scale immerses rather than produces spectacle. Ruin voices possibility instead of only disaster. The viscera of this piece lay bare; however, they do not overwhelm but weirdly enthral. It is in this parched garden with its skeletal irrigation ducts exposed that all falls apart and comes together. Everything swirls around an empty centre, a void. But from this nothingness everything radiates outwards and, conversely, is sucked back inwards. This two-way vortex should be impossible, but it is not in Shono’s world. With an energy that is subtle as much as it is defiant The Ground Day Breaks offers a broken horizon, but a horizon, nonetheless. This work strongly resonates with how Brahim El Guabli typifies the desert as both necropolis and life source, as a site that is “terrifying and edifying; dangerous and peaceful.” Shono presents us with an exhibition that encompasses all these contradictions and how they are enveloped in a tiny grain of sand.
The entire creation of this exhibition is grounded in the essential interconnection between the pieces that compose it and their process. Each work is the result of an action that simultaneously combines the uncontrollable randomness of chaos with a careful exercise of coordination and study. This process has triggered a chain reaction, developing each piece as a consequence of the previous action, allowing the narrative to emerge coherently, linearly, and gradually.
images courtesy from Artur Weber and Federico Acciardi
