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’
The Silence is Still Talking 2019
How has your experience in Saudi Arabia been as it pertains to your art?
Since 2015, I started doing a few solo exhibitions and residencies, eventually ending with a year-long residency in Berlin until 2019. I came back to Saudi at a time of change. In 2019, while I was back for my solo exhibition at Athr Gallery, The Silence is Still Talking, I began to sense something different—a feeling of hope, glimmers of change. At its core, the solo exhibition was about breaking down rigid, defined words and narratives. It’s about grinding something resistant to change, something with a fixed meaning, until it loses its form and becomes illegible. We return to the potential of raw pigments, to something that no longer carries the burden of rigid definition.
We are in a crisis of the word, where language has become rigid, divisive, and literal. In response, Muhannad Shono explores the transformative potential of words by slowing their utterance and studying their nuances. He grinds charcoal into dust, symbolising the infinite possibilities of meaning. These specs represent quantum-like states, embodying the spirit rather than the literal letters of words.
Shono’s work reflects on how language shapes our understanding of the world. His charcoal sculptures, The Hardened Word, represent brittle, dried-out words, signalling the loss of nuance and metaphor. By grinding these sculptures into dust, Shono revives meaning, using vibrations and sound to reanimate the material in his piece, The Matter of Meaning.
The exhibition delves into early forms of spoken word, where language was not just verbal but also performed through gestures and sounds. Shono’s Lisans sculptures highlight the performative nature of language, recalling the body’s role in communication. His works, including Mother Tongue and Lullaby Departed, speak to the loss of memory and knowledge embedded in disappearing languages.
Shono also critiques the written word’s history of misuse and erasure, exemplified in The Silent Press, which addresses the power dynamics of textuality. His art invites us to move beyond literal interpretations, encouraging constant cycles of reading, learning, and reinterpretation, as reflected in his series Reformation and Reading Ring.
In The Silence Is Still Talking, Shono asks us to reimagine words as living, evolving entities that shape our understanding of ourselves and the world.
