The Ground Day Breaks

A solo exhibition by Muhannad Shono
curated by Nat Muller

ATHR Gallery (Riyadh), 2024

Desert sand cannot bond into durable concrete; it resists the monolith, the icon, the monument that would lock a single story into form. Architecture becomes an uneditable text—its rigid form must fracture, opening onto landscapes of imagination and infinite readings.

Once compressed into rigid moulds, this carbon-fired desert sand served foundries until deemed spent—unfit even for construction, which must import coarser aggregates. Shono retrieves the rejected material and enacts a counter-ritual: the mould is shattered, the mono-form erased, and millions of particles surge across the gallery floor.

The fracture is the thesis. A single, fixed body dissolves into a restless field; grains gather, drift, and scatter, refusing any final geometry. Narrative shifts with them: from fixed block to perpetual potential. Industrial residue becomes a medium of imagination, its past eclipsed by speculative futures.

The choice is timely. Saudi Arabia builds at high velocity while ecological limits tighten. By working with sand—matrix of microchips, glass, concrete, and dunes—Shono shows that each particle carries simultaneous endings and beginnings.

Material research turns to world-unmaking and world-making. Through line, erosion, and entropy, discarded casting sand opens a terrain where new stories proliferate. Every attempt to fix, confine, or finish is destined to be ground down and to begin again in the ceaseless movement of the grain.

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.

Muhannad Shono The Ground Day Breaks ATHR Gallery Saudi Artist Solo Exhibition
Muhannad Shono The Ground Day Breaks Saudi Contemporary Art Solo Exhibition Federico Acciardi
muhannad shono saudi contemporary artist the ground day breaks large scale art riyadh Athr gallery curated by Nat Muller
muhannad shono saudi contemporary artist the ground day breaks large scale art riyadh Athr gallery curated by Nat Muller
muhannad shono saudi contemporary artist the ground day breaks large scale art riyadh Athr gallery curated by Nat Muller

Night Dew

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.

muhannad shono saudi contemporary artist the ground day breaks large scale art riyadh Athr gallery curated by Nat Muller
muhannad shono saudi contemporary artist the ground day breaks large scale art riyadh Athr gallery curated by Nat Muller
muhannad shono saudi contemporary artist the ground day breaks large scale art riyadh Athr gallery curated by Nat Muller

What Remains

reclaimed sand

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