The Last Garden of Khidr
The Last Garden of Khidr is the imagined sculptural and illustrative aftermath of a beheading, a contemporary rendition of the character Khidr, an elusive figure spoken of in various Islamic narratives and found across many world myths and traditions. The origins of the name “Khidr” are obscure, with roots spreading from Quranic traditions into wider cultural lore, as well as traced through Western literary and architectural motifs dating back to the medieval age. One reading is that his name comes from akhdar (green, in Arabic), and he is, therefore, “The Green One” or “The Verdant One,” from whose head a garden grows. The artist mines this abundant tradition to explore ideas of creative freedom.
Aniconism is the avoidance of images of sentient beings in some forms of Islamic art. In more stricter interpretations, this ban extends to God and deities to fictional characters and the depiction of the self. In this stricter uncompromising law, all living beings, and everything that exists fall under a prohibition of the mimicry of life.
The artist recalls how, as a child, art teachers in Saudi Arabia would instruct him and other students to strike a line through the necks of illustrated drawings. This was a technical “work-around” to this religious prohibition conjured up by his teachers, but to Shono’s mind this contemporary commandment constituted a violent act, an attempted beheading of his imagined world and the living creations that dwell within it.
“I made a choice from a young age to wield the line to create and not to decapitate”, Shono said.
A beheading becomes a tool to silence the creative individual that may speak truth to power, as well as a method of cutting off from its roots the social change that might be unleashed. Khidr, or The Green Man as he is known in world folklore and mythology, is described as a character that endures many decapitations throughout his adventures yet time and time again regrows like a tree.
Thus Khidr is a character who lives within the same theological text that attempts to decapitate him. The Last Garden of Khidr is the story of those who choose to reclaim their creative and imaginative minds and refuse to be silenced.
Commissioned by the Saudi Art Council for the group show I love you urgently curated by Maya El Khalil.
