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’
Last Garden of Khidr, 2020
This work represents a mock execution of the mythical character Al-Khidr, who plays a significant role in my art. Al-Khidr is associated with Osiris, the only pharaoh depicted as green, and the god of corn. He taught the Egyptians how to harvest corn and helped it grow again. After Osiris was killed and dismembered, his limbs and head were planted in different parts of the kingdom in hopes of resurrecting the corn, as he had instructed them.
Al-Khidr also holds an important story in the Quran, where he is depicted as a figure of great wisdom and immortality. Al-Khidr will come back to life, ultimately changing the course of mankind. In this narrative, Al-Khidr embodies the idea of resilience. The return to life symbolises that the act of suppressing the imagination is ultimately futile, leading only to the birth of more imagination.
The Last Garden of Khidr is the imagined sculptural and illustrative aftermath of restricting the human imagination, a contemporary rendition of the character Khidr, an elusive figure spoken of in various Islamic narratives and found across many world myths and traditions. The origins of the name “Khidr” are obscure, with roots spreading from Quranic traditions into wider cultural lore, as well as traced through Western literary and architectural motifs dating back to the medieval age. One reading is that his name comes from akhdar (green, in Arabic), and he is, therefore, “The Green One” or “The Verdant One,” from whose head a garden grows. The artist mines this abundant tradition to explore ideas of creative freedom.
Aniconism is the avoidance of images of sentient beings in some forms of Islamic art. In stricter interpretations, this ban extends to God and deities to fictional characters and the depiction of the self. In this stricter uncompromising law, all living beings, and everything that exists fall under a prohibition of the mimicry of life.
The artist recalls how, as a child, art teachers in Saudi Arabia would instruct him and other students to strike a line through the necks of illustrated drawings. This was a technical “workaround” to this religious prohibition conjured up by his teachers, but to Shono’s mind, this contemporary commandment constituted a violent act, an attempted beheading of his imagined world and the living creations that dwell within it.
The Last Garden of Khidr is the story of those who choose to reclaim their creative and imaginative minds and refuse to be silenced.
Commissioned by the Saudi Art Council for the group show ‘I Love You Urgently’ curated by Maya El Khalil.