This article appeared in Being Muhannad Shono Issue #70 which delves into the world of Saudi artist Muhannad Shono, exploring his creative journey, artistic process, and global impact. Through visuals and an in-depth interview, it highlights Shono’s works that connect personal memory with universal themes. The issue traces his evolution from early creations to monumental installations, revealing a progression driven by curiosity and innovation. This issue celebrates Shono’s global success and his curatorial role in the 2025 Islamic Arts Biennale.
Issue #70 ‘Being Muhannad Shono’
In Children of Yam, Shono ventured beyond his initial artistic style, delving into how narratives can be reshaped and reimagined across diverse conceptual landscapes. By the time he began developing The Silence is Still Talking in 2019, he had completed a year-long residency in Berlin. Shono returned to Saudi Arabia during a period of profound social and cultural transformation. He experimented with robotics that led to works like The Teaching Tree and On Losing Meaning. Shono also revisited his iconic figure, Al-Khidr, in The Last Garden of Khidr in 2020, focusing on themes of limiting the human imagination, and illustrating that suppression is ultimately futile.
In 2022, Shono continued to dismantle rigid narratives with On This Sacred Day, capturing his experience in AlUla as he witnessed the burning of palm trees—a visceral response to change. This work reflects on protest and the transformative power of change, pushing the boundaries of expression. Two years later, through The Ground Day Breaks, Shono takes viewers on a long and remarkabe journey of impermanence and limitlessness through the sand grain.
Here, we explore nine of Shono’s most influential works, delving into his creative process and the captivating stories behind each piece.
Children of Yam, 2016
Could you tell us about Children of Yam? It seems to have different parts.
It was a solo exhibition that included an animated film, ink-on-paper works, and sculptures. The experience was a psychological journey because I had to let go of the illustrative, figurative, character-driven world that I loved. In that process, I essentially ‘zoomed out’, pulling away from that world emotionally, mentally, and physically through the work. The characters became almost minuscule, and the focus shifted to the landscape of the narrative. It was difficult because I felt like a sellout, as if I was abstracting the work in the same way I was asked to obscure the figurative when I was younger.
At the time of my 2016 solo exhibition, I had distanced myself significantly from my original approach. Since then, I’ve continued to move further away, exploring how narratives and ideas can reshape and adapt to different visual and conceptual spaces. I allowed myself to go through this journey of abandoning the characters and style I had built, in order to discover something new. In a way, that exhibition marked a significant shift, and looking back, it was a valuable process of growth.
In this series of work, paper is seen as the land we find ourselves standing on and the ink: the forces driving us out of our lands. Together, the paper and ink are the record of events. We stand on pages with stories from the past. Pages we cannot open. A book of stories we cannot read. A document of lessons we cannot learn from.
Children of Yam explores these notions through the fictional story of Yam. The forgotten 4th son of the biblical and Quranic character, Noah. Yam refused to climb onto the Ark and chose to seek refuge on a mountain top instead. Though he was vilified in the religious narrative for disobeying his father’s commands, Shono saw in him a figure who chose to turn down doctrine and instead trusted in himself and in his free will. Fear of retribution did not drive him into the safety of his father’s doctrine. To that end the artist assumed that Yam had survived the deluge, and his children became the refugees of the world, forever fleeing floods. His story and the story of his lost children is a story of immigrants through time. They are the forgotten, the inked over and the displaced. Shono draws our attention to the fact that though some of us are sedentary, we too were once, and again will be, displaced.
