The Teaching Tree
The National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia, la Biennale di Venezia, 2022. Curated by Reem Fadda & assistant curator Rotana Shaker.
The Commissioner, the Visual Art Commission of Saudi Arabia
The Teaching Tree is an origin story cast as a timeline. It begins in Saudi classrooms of the 1980s, where an aniconic curriculum declared that “only a creator may create.” Teachers, policing imagination, ordered a stroke of ink through every drawn neck. That punitive mark—the mandate to cut down—becomes here the defiant line of creative resistance.
From this single palm‑stem line an act of resistance germinates and becomes undeniable, multiplying within the pavilion of a changing nation into an ever‑branching, living imagination. Out of charred palm rises a new manifestation of thought—a landscape made more fertile and resilient despite—and because of—attempts to fell the forests of the mind. The tree breathes through pneumatic systems; it was never dead, only transformed. Its anatomy reads as a timeline: one artist’s refusal widening into a collective narrative of Saudi transformation, from prescriptive singularity to plural, self‑authored futures.
The installation declares that efforts to sever imagination only strengthen it. Redaction begets reinvention; prohibition accelerates growth. What was once cut down now scaffolds renewal—continuing to grow despite teachings that sought to silence it—and invites the public to walk a living syllabus where form, nation, and imagination evolve together: irrepressible, regenerative, and self‑propagating.
Sculptural installation, with palm fronds, pigment, pneumatics and metal structure.
