Saudi Pavilion: Hey, Algorithm, Leave Those Hands Alone.

Adilson De Oliveira

1 July 2026

Dana Awartani’s Saudi Pavilion is a fragile, furious hymn to craft, mourning and the artisanship that software still cannot fake.

I did not expect to be humbled by bricks.

That sounds stupid, I know, especially at Venice, where one spends most of the week being professionally humbled by queues, heat that clings like a damp second skin, wealth that glints like cutlery laid out for a feast you weren’t invited to, coffee that tastes like regret brewed in a hurry, shoes that stride past like minor aristocrats, and the creeping sense that Europe has perfected the art of wearing its conscience like a tailored jacket. But Dana Awartani’s May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones did something worse. It forced me to sit still. It made me look down. It made me shut the fuck up.

This is not a small achievement. My brain, like many brains raised between MTV reality television, LimeWire viruses, early internet shock sites, TikTok doom-scrolls, online pornography, YouTube tutorials, WhatsApp psychosis and generative A.I. slop, has been trained badly. It wants velocity. It wants cuts. It wants a screen that rewards it every 7 seconds for continuing to exist. I am of the generation that can watch twelve disasters unfold at once and still feel bored, like my brain is a starving dog that only eats flashing pixels. So to stand alone in a room before a floor of clay, earth, pattern, silence and repetition should, by every damaged neurological measure, have bored me to death.

Instead, it rearranged the furniture inside my skull.

Awartani’s installation occupies the floor of the Saudi Arabian Pavilion like an archaeological memory that has refused to remain buried. Made from 29,221 sunbaked clay earth bricks, the work gathers mosaic references from sites across Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, places damaged, threatened, preserved, mourned, restored and sometimes reduced to the bureaucratic afterlife of heritage reports. Mosques, churches, synagogues, monasteries, necropolises, caravansaries, museums, domestic places, sacred places, civic places. Not ruins as Instagram melancholy. Not stones as tasteful despair. Stones as witnesses. Stones as vessels. Stones as the stubborn material grammar through which people continue to speak after empire, war, occupation, weather, neglect, and time have all had their turn.

The first shock is physical. The work is beautiful in the least fashionable sense of the word. Not cute. Not “immersive.” Not the kind of overproduced digital aquarium that contemporary art keeps mistaking for depth. It is beautiful because it has weight, and because that weight has been earned. The geometry does not perform complexity. It submits to it. Floral and faunal motifs, repeated patterns, arches, bands, fragments of ancient floors, all assembled into a composite that feels less like representation than resuscitation. You do not simply look at the work. You are implicated by your own feet. The act of walking becomes suddenly embarrassing, almost violent. Every step asks what it means to traverse somebody else’s memory.

This is where the politics of the pavilion become difficult, and they should remain difficult. It would be idiotic to pretend that a national pavilion is innocent. Saudi Arabia, like every national pavilion in Venice, arrives wrapped in the soft power machinery of state representation. Culture is never presented at this scale without agenda, funding, branding, protocol, diplomacy and institutional desire. The danger with such works is that grief becomes useful. Heritage becomes currency. Care becomes image management. The Middle East, in particular, is too often forced to arrive at European events as either spectacle, trauma, luxury or proof of civilisational depth for audiences that still need reminding that history did not begin in Paris.

Awartani’s achievement is that the work does not collapse into the machinery carrying it. It is not naïve about beauty. It does not offer heritage as decorative innocence. It insists that culture is material, breakable, communal and political, but it also resists becoming a poster. There is no cheap moral slogan here. No trauma carnival. No giant screen instructing you exactly how to feel. Instead, there is earth, cracked and cracking. Clay without binding agents. Forms vulnerable to time by design. It is a monument that has the decency to admit it is fragile.

I came to the exhibition carrying my usual afflictions regarding A.I., especially the generative kind. I have drunk the Kool-Aid, and worse, I have enjoyed the flavour. I know what it can do. I know how quickly it can produce the illusion of labour, the simulation of style, the counterfeit of touch. I know the obscene pleasure of typing something into a box and watching an image arrive like a small act of witchcraft performed by a server farm. But in an interview with the curator, Antonia Carver, I was told something that has lodged in me uncomfortably ever since: that the digital tools, the software, the mapping systems, could eventually become less accurate than the artisans.

Less accurate than the hands.

What a devastating sentence in 2026. The software, with all its confidence, all its predictive arrogance, all its clean computational authority, defeated by people who know wood, clay, pressure, millimetres, repetition, failure and correction through the intelligence of the body. One millimetre out and the pieces do not fit. No prompt can negotiate that. No algorithm understands the humiliation of remaking something because the material said no.

And this is where the exhibition becomes quietly radical. The artisans are not a ghost team. They are not hidden behind the heroic singularity of “the artist” while labour disappears into the polite sewage system of contemporary art production. Their names are there. A. Assallumi, A. Shishu, A.K. Hamidarahman, A. Rahman, A.M. Muhammad Uthman, A. Hussein, A. Nawaz, A. Safaddin, F.A. Assallumi, G.R. Jan Zeb Khan, H. Intajar, H.U. Muhammad Hayet, I.K. Sherzamin Khan, I. Maula, I. Hussein, I.M. Qimit Shah, J. Tantau, K.U. Hamidarahman, K.F. Wahid, K.M. Sultan Muhammad, K.B. Nasib Gul, M.A. Younis, M. Faisal, M. Faheem, M. Salim, M. Safaddin, M.S. Alislam, M.W. Alabbadi, N. Aslam, N. Zada Baz Gul, P.R. Jehan Zeb, S. Adnan, S. Amin Khan, S.M. Amin Rahman, S.K. Sar Gul.

Read that again. It has rhythm. It has dignity. It has politics.

In an art world where “collaboration” often means an artist had an idea and a small army of unnamed technicians bled it into existence, this crediting matters. It does not solve the hierarchy, but it names the labour. Naming is not everything, but erasure often begins where naming stops. Here, the wall text becomes an ethical surface. Not perfect, not revolutionary in itself, but necessary. A refusal of the smooth fiction that contemporary artworks arrive from genius alone.

The great intelligence of Awartani’s work is that it understands craft not as nostalgia, but as technology. This is where the lazy binary collapses. Handmade does not mean anti-modern. Clay is not the opposite of computation. Geometry is not primitive because it precedes software. The artisan’s hand is not an emotional supplement to the machine. It is a knowledge system. It stores mathematics, climate, pressure, failure, memory, apprenticeship, stubbornness. It is software running through bone.

There is something deeply suspicious about meeting this work in Venice, a city that behaves like a drowned chandelier: glittering, expensive, half-rotten, and still somehow convinced it is the centre of civilisation. Around the Arsenale, culture is constantly being laundered through importance. Nations arrive dressed as ideas. Curators speak as if urgency were a fabric they had commissioned. Collectors drift through the rooms with the soft panic of people trying to look moved before lunch. Everybody carries a tote bag full of printed matter that will one day become a very tasteful doorstop. And then Awartani gives us a floor that refuses the whole digestive system. It will not be swallowed quickly. It does not perform for the camera like a drunk influencer at a hotel pool. It sits there, low and stubborn, slowing the room to the speed of mud, remembering its shape.

That slowness is not romantic. It is political. Against automation, against displacement, against the flattening of memory into content, against the endless scroll of destroyed places we consume between adverts, ass, war, food reviews and dinner reservations, the work insists on repair as duration. Not repair as branding. Repair as labour. Repair as mourning with its sleeves rolled up. Repair as the refusal to let ruins become mute.

I left the pavilion feeling something I hate admitting because it sounds too clean, too redeemed: grateful. Not converted away from A.I., not suddenly pure, not ready to throw my laptop into the canal and become an apprentice carpenter in the old Portuguese suburbs of Southern Johannesburg. I remain compromised. We all are. But the work made my compromises visible. It reminded me that speed is not intelligence. That generation is not creation. That accuracy may belong, finally, to the hand that has failed enough times to know what matter will allow.

Awartani does not ask us to worship stones. She asks us to understand why people weep over them. In a world addicted to replacement, that is no small thing. To weep over stones is to insist that memory has a body. That history has texture. That culture is not an abstract inheritance but something pressed, dried, cracked, carried, named and laid down by many hands.

So yes, fuck, I have to rethink a lot. About A.I. About the miracle and the con. About my own little prompt-happy arrogance. About the fact that somewhere in the great, badly ventilated workshop of the afterlife, my ancestors, carpenters, artisans, men who knew wood by smell and measurement by scar tissue, are probably looking down at me. Or up, some of them were bastards. Either way, I can see them shaking their heads, raising their blistered, chafed fists, and cursing me in Portuguese for needing a Saudi pavilion in Venice to remind me that the hand was never obsolete. It was waiting for this idiot to catch up.  

Adilson De Oliviera joins the ART AFRICA team as a guest writer while taking up a long-term fellowship with the ART AFRICA Foundation. Working closely with Suzette and Brendon Bell-Roberts, he focuses on developing new outlets for critical art writing and helping to develop young voices within ART AFRICA’s Programme.

Adilson De Oliveira is a Johannesburg-born multidisciplinary artist, animator, and cultural practitioner whose work explores history, memory, and Luso-African identity through satire, technology, and decolonial critique. A Fine Arts graduate from the University of the Witwatersrand, he began as a printmaker before shifting toward a practice that treats machines as creative collaborators. Since co-founding The Magolide Collective in 2019, De Oliveira has used media such as drawing, video, XR, and AI to challenge the Western art canon and blur the boundaries between truth and fiction. His work serves as both a resistance and an archive, capturing the complex realities of postcolonial South Africa.