Walking through Sara Shamma’s The Tower Tomb of Palmyra at the 61st Venice Biennale
16 July 2026
The Syrian Pavilion reveals itself long before you reach it, and that is the point. Titled The Tower Tomb of Palmyra, the Syrian Arab Republic’s first official solo national presentation at the Venice Biennale is anchored by a fifteen-metre reconstruction of one of Palmyra’s ancient funerary towers, its monumental form visible from the water well before visitors arrive at the entrance. Shamma explains that this was entirely intentional. She wanted the tower to be encountered first, allowing visitors time to absorb its presence before stepping inside.
The decision establishes the pavilion’s central rhythm. It asks visitors to begin not with painting, but with architecture; not with interpretation, but with observation. Yet as we stand beneath the reconstructed tower, Shamma is quick to shift the conversation away from Venice. The project, she explains, did not begin here. Its origins lie in Damascus, in a place she returned to repeatedly as a young artist: the National Museum of Damascus.
Long before she imagined rebuilding one of Palmyra’s tower tombs, Shamma spent countless hours drawing the museum’s reconstruction of the ancient funerary monument. It became a place of study and reflection, but also of artistic discovery. While the tower itself fascinated her, it was the carved limestone reliefs sealing the burial niches that left the deepest impression. These portraits, she reflects, represent some of the earliest manifestations of portraiture in Syria. Seen today, they reveal an enduring concern with the human figure that has remained central to her own practice, where portraiture is never simply representational but a means of exploring identity, memory and psychological presence.
Those early encounters gradually evolved into a project that would occupy Shamma for more than a decade. The first drawings and paintings inspired by the tower emerged around 2016, before developing into a formal proposal with the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 2019. Planning had already begun for construction in the museum’s gardens when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the institution to suspend the commission. The project remained unrealised until Syria’s Ministry of Culture invited Shamma to represent the country at the Venice Biennale. Rather than conceiving something new, she returned to an idea she had never abandoned.
That sense of returning recurs throughout our conversation and sharpens the pavilion’s central argument. Shamma returns to Damascus, to Palmyra, to portraiture, and repeatedly to the question of why the ancient funerary towers have remained so significant within her imagination. It is a conversation rooted neither in archaeology nor nostalgia, but in continuity. The tower is not simply an historical monument. It is a point of departure for thinking about how images preserve human presence over time.
Inside, the relationship between monument and image shifts again. The pavilion consists of a single chamber, its scale unexpectedly restrained after the imposing exterior. Four monumental paintings occupy the interior, suspended within the reconstructed architecture rather than competing with it. The effect is neither theatrical nor didactic. Instead, the paintings establish a measured pace, encouraging sustained attention rather than rapid movement through the space.
Around them, an understated soundscape developed in collaboration with the Syrian Association of Cinema fills the room. Wind moves quietly across stone. Water drips at irregular intervals. Beneath both is the low hum of women’s voices, almost imperceptible at first, yet gradually becoming part of the pavilion’s atmosphere. Shamma explains that these sounds were drawn from the landscape and rituals surrounding the ancient tombs, where water carried symbolic significance, and the desert itself became an acoustic presence.
The environment extends beyond sound. Working with traditional perfumers in Damascus’s Old Souk, Shamma developed a bespoke fragrance for the pavilion, adding another sensory register to the experience. Together, painting, architecture, sound and scent form a carefully considered whole, although none seeks to dominate the others. The result is not an installation assembled from different media, but a single work in which each element contributes to a shared atmosphere.
The precision of that environment stands in marked contrast to Shamma’s usual approach to painting. She reflects on rarely beginning with preparatory sketches, preferring instead to discover an image through the act of painting itself. Improvisation has long shaped her practice. Here, however, every dimension had to be resolved in advance. The scale of the reconstructed tower determined the placement of the paintings, while architects, engineers and designers translated the project into a structure capable of occupying the Venetian site. It is one of the few occasions, Shamma observes, when the demands of architecture preceded those of painting.
Yet the pavilion retains an openness that feels remarkably consistent with her wider practice. That balance between careful construction and intuitive making resonates strongly with Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial framework, In Minor Keys. Shamma reflects on her affinity for forms of music built through improvisation rather than orchestral precision, citing Sufi traditions and the emotional directness of the blues. Although the pavilion demanded meticulous preparation, the paintings themselves emerged without predetermined compositions, allowing intuition to remain central to the creative process.
It is here that the conversation returns to the pavilion’s underlying claim. Shamma reflects on having been interested in death from a young age, describing it as “the trigger of creativity”. The remark is neither provocative nor melancholic. Instead, it offers a way of understanding the project as a whole. We create because we want to leave a mark, she explains, because creativity itself is a celebration of life. Read through that proposition, and the funerary tower assumes another significance. It no longer functions simply as an archaeological monument or an historical reconstruction. It becomes a place where mortality and artistic creation exist simultaneously, each giving meaning to the other.
That understanding becomes especially significant when Shamma speaks of the tower’s reconstruction. The original funerary towers of Palmyra, among the city’s most distinctive architectural forms, were destroyed during the Syrian conflict. Their absence presented not only an emotional challenge but a practical one. The team could not simply photograph the monument and enlarge the image to the scale required for Venice. Instead, the tower had to be digitally reconstructed from surviving documentation before it could be translated into the fifteen-metre structure that now stands at Università IUAV di Venezia, making the reconstruction itself part of the pavilion’s meaning.
The process raises questions that extend well beyond architectural reconstruction and sharpen the pavilion’s larger argument. What stands in Venice is not a replica, nor does it attempt to erase the violence that led to the monument’s destruction. Instead, it suggests another way of thinking about cultural inheritance. Reconstruction here becomes an act of interpretation rather than restoration, acknowledging that while the original cannot be recovered, its histories, meanings and artistic possibilities remain open to renewed engagement. The pavilion therefore occupies a space between archaeology and contemporary art, where research, technology and artistic imagination converge to recover not only a structure, but the cultural narratives embedded within it.
That approach also informs the paintings. Although deeply contemporary in their execution, they remain in conversation with the funerary portraits that first captivated Shamma in Damascus. Those carved reliefs were never intended as likenesses alone. They preserved identity, memory and presence beyond death. Seen alongside the reconstructed tower, Shamma’s paintings continue that lineage, asking what portraiture can still achieve in the present. Rather than commemorating specific individuals, they become meditations on human continuity itself, reminding us that portraiture has always carried the desire to outlast absence.
This understanding lends particular weight to Shamma’s assertion that creativity celebrates life and clarifies the pavilion’s thesis. Throughout our conversation, she returns to the idea that making art is, fundamentally, an act of affirmation. It is not death that occupies the centre of the pavilion, but the creative impulse that follows it. In this sense, The Tower Tomb of Palmyra is less concerned with mourning than with continuity. It proposes that artistic practice remains one of the ways societies carry memory forward, not by preserving the past unchanged, but by allowing it to be reimagined by successive generations.
The pavilion’s sensory environment reinforces that proposition. The sound of wind moving across stone recalls the desert landscape without attempting to reproduce it literally. The steady rhythm of dripping water evokes ancient funerary rituals while introducing a quiet temporal cadence into the room. The fragrance developed with traditional perfumers in Damascus’s Old Souk connects the work to living craft traditions that continue to shape the city’s cultural identity. None of these elements functions as an illustration. Together, they establish an atmosphere in which memory is experienced through the senses as much as through historical knowledge.
Equally considered was Shamma’s decision to collaborate with Japanese curator Yuko Hasegawa. Rather than selecting a curator already immersed in Middle Eastern discourse, she sought an external perspective that could expand the pavilion’s international reach while remaining attentive to its Syrian specificity. Before work began, Hasegawa travelled to Damascus, visiting Shamma’s studio and spending time understanding both the artist’s practice and the historical context from which the project emerged. Their collaboration resists the tendency to frame Syria primarily in terms of conflict, instead positioning the pavilion within broader conversations about art, history and cultural transmission.
The choice of venue also reflects the project’s ambitions. Hosted at Università IUAV di Venezia, whose campus provided the scale necessary to realise the reconstructed tower, the pavilion occupies a site where architecture is not simply a backdrop but an active participant in the work. Shamma explains that the tower’s visibility from the water was an important consideration in selecting the location. Before visitors encounter the paintings, they encounter the monument itself. The journey towards the pavilion, therefore, becomes part of the experience, extending the work beyond the walls of the exhibition space.
Looking back towards the pavilion as I leave, the tower once again dominates the view. It is the first thing visible and, in many respects, the last image that remains. Earlier, Shamma had explained that she wanted visitors to see it before entering. By the end of our conversation, that decision reads differently. The tower announces itself before its history is known, much as memory often does. Only gradually does it reveal the many lives, histories and ideas it contains.
In Venice, The Tower Tomb of Palmyra does not seek to reconstruct the past in its original form, nor does it ask visitors to dwell solely on what has been lost. Instead, it suggests that cultural memory survives because it continues to be remade. Through painting, architecture, sound and scent, Shamma demonstrates that reconstruction is not simply the recovery of damaged monuments, but an enduring act of artistic creation. The pavilion ultimately leaves us with a proposition that extends far beyond Palmyra itself: that culture endures not because history can be restored, but because artists continue to imagine what remains possible after loss.
Suzette Bell-Roberts is editor and co-founder of ART AFRICA.
