


Muhannad Shono سعودي, 1977
The Ground Day Break, 2024
Reclaimed sand, resin
2000 handcrafted sculptures of variable size
2000 handcrafted sculptures of variable size
Floor dimensions: 17.0 x 17.0 m
Further images
The Ground Day Breaks, a large-scale site-specific installation consisting of approximately 2000 handcrafted sculptures arranged in a radial pattern. Few artists manage to marry monumentality with tenderness and poetic sophistication....
The Ground Day Breaks, a large-scale site-specific installation consisting of approximately 2000 handcrafted sculptures arranged in a radial pattern. Few artists manage to marry monumentality with tenderness and poetic sophistication. This is exactly what Shon achieves in this intervention. Scale immerses rather than produces spectacle. Ruin voices possibility instead of only disaster. The viscera of this piece lay bare however, they do not overwhelm but weirdly enthrall. It is in this parched garden with its skeletal irrigation ducts exposed that all falls apart and comes together. Everything swirls around an empty center, a void But from this nothingness, everything radiates outwards and conversely, is sucked back inwards. This two-way vortex should be impossible, but it is not in Shono's world. With an energy that is subtle as much as it is defiant The Ground Day Breaks offers a broken horizon, but a horizon, nonetheless. This work strongly resonates with how Brahim El Guabli typifies the desert as both necropolis and life source, as a site that is terrifying and edifying, dangerous and peaceful." Shono presents us with an exhibition that encompasses all these contradictions and how they are enveloped in a tiny grain of sand.