Art / Arnolfini Arts
Arnolfini hosts twin summer exhibitions: Dana Awartani and Sahara Longe
For summer 2025, Arnolfini are presenting two exhibitions concurrently – both opening on June 28 after a special launch event, and running until the end of September.
Palestinian-Saudi artist Dana Awartani’s Standing by the ruins will be accompanied by a collection of work from British painter Sahara Longe: The other side of the mountain.
In their own unique ways, both artists are examining recurrent themes of memory, identity and loss.
is needed now More than ever
Dana Awartani, Artist Portrait – photo: courtesy of the artist and Ali Alsumaiyn
In her first institutional European solo exhibition, Awartani confronts the physical loss of cultural heritage “through the lens of abandoned, destroyed and vanishing places”.
Her work spans multiple disciplines, from painting and large-scale installation to textiles, film and performance.
Dana Awartani, Standing by the Ruins, 2019. © Dana Awartani – photo: courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery
Drawing attention to traditional craft and architectural techniques including textile dying and darning and adobe building, Awartani’s aesthetic is shot through with both strength and fragility.
In recording, rebuilding and reimagining what has been lost – for example in darned ‘maps’ of sites damaged during the Arab Spring in 2010, her work evokes a powerful sense of the passing of time; of both the power and pain of remembering, healing and forgetting.
Let me mend your broken bones 5, 2023. © Dana Awartani – photo: courtesy Lisson Gallery
The work shown includes Come, let me heal your wounds. Let me mend your broken bones – commissioned for the 2024 Venice Biennale, and a newly commissioned piece, Standing by the Ruins III, which was created in conjunction with a group of craftsmen from Riyadh.
This installation is a recreation of the Ottoman-influenced floor design of the historic bathhouse, the Hamam al-Sammara in Gaza – understood to have been destroyed by the Israeli military during the current conflict.
Sahara Longe in her studio, Suffolk, UK, November 2023 – photo: Ollo Weguelin © Sahara Longe. Courtesy the artist and Timothy Taylor
Like Awartani, Longe’s The other side of the mountain will also represent her first institutional solo exhibition.
It features a series of dream-like semi-abstract paintings inspired by the nostalgia of childhood memories and old family photographs, alongside Doris Lessing’s seminal feminist novel, The Golden Notebook (1962), which resonates deeply with Longe.
Sahara Longe Schoolgirls 2025. Courtesy the artist and Timothy Taylor – photo: Prudence Cuming. © Sahara Longe
Varying in scale, the images are rich and evocative, conjuring a liminal space often drawn from snapshots in time, or particular sense memories; the viewer is then invited to transpose their own narratives onto the work.
Both exhibitions are accompanied by a programme of live performance and wellbeing workshops, as well as an Arnolfini Late event on September 18, for which details are still to be announced.
Sahara Longe The Yellow Dress 2025. Courtesy the artist and Timothy Taylor – photo: Prudence Cuming. © Sahara Longe
Sahara Longe: The other side of the mountain and Dana Awartani: Standing by the ruins will be open from June 28-September 28.
Both exhibitions are free, with a suggested £5 donation for those who are able. The gallery is open Tuesday-Sunday, 11am-6pm. More information is available at www.arnolfini.org.uk.
Main photo: I Went Away and Forgot You. A While Ago I Remembered. I Remembered I’d Forgotten You. I Was Dreaming, 2019. © Dana Awartani, courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery.
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