The Ground Day Breaks
A solo exhibition by Muhannad Shono
curated by Nat Muller, ATHR Gallery (Riyadh), 2024
The Ground Day Breaks begins with a single industrial relic: black foundry sand. Once compressed into rigid moulds, this carbon‑fired desert grain served industry until it was declared spent—useless even for construction, which imports coarser aggregates. Shono reclaims the cast‑off material and subjects it to a counter‑ritual: the mould is broken, the mono‑form undone, and millions of loosened particles scatter across the gallery floor.
That fracture is the work’s thesis. A single, uncompromising shape splinters into a field of restless grains that coagulate, drift, and burst apart again, refusing any final geometry. In that turbulence, narrative itself is renegotiated; meaning is no longer a fixed block but an ever‑shifting potential. The foundry product becomes a substance of imagination, its industrial history eclipsed by new, speculative futures.
The timing is deliberate. Saudi Arabia stands in accelerated flux; the planet confronts ecological precarity. By choosing sand—bedrock of microchips, concrete, glass, and the peninsula’s dunes—Shono reminds us that the smallest unit of landscape already contains multitudes. Vince Beiser calls sand “both minuscule and infinite,” and the installation stages that paradox: each grain a point of disappearance and of inception.
Material research here becomes acts of world‑building. Wielding line, erosion, and entropy as aesthetic tools, Shono turns a discarded casting medium into an open terrain where stories proliferate. What was once a single, spent form re‑emerges as an inexhaustible reservoir of possibility—proof that every attempt to fix, confine, or finish can be ground down into fluid potential and begin again.
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