Article published in Muhannad Shono Works [2014–2024], editor Nat Muller, published by Kehrer Verlag, 2024. Information here.
Muhannad Shono has made works that fill galleries, and even an abandoned warehouse bay. One work menaces steel columns with structural failure, while another surges through a wide-angle landscape of mesas. His latest projects soar to the heavens. More intimate works also command real-world tactility: falling detritus, and therefore the aerosphere, are of the artist’s palette.1
If one cannot experience such works that participate in the world, is any attempt to write about them made futile?
With a single exception, I have encountered works by Shono only in representation. I realized, however, that I could explore them through a medium that both the artist and I have relied upon: architecture. More than a profession, architecture is a way of thinking. It employs an ideographic language with a vocabulary of symbols, shapes, hatches, and scaled-down depictions. These all reduce to the inked line. One might lose fluency in this language for lack of practice, but, like any other language, we cannot unlearn it. For better or worse, its structures, grammar, and idioms remain with us. The architectural line, this language’s underlying principle, advances forward, insistent, and stringent, forever slicing space.
With architecture as the medium, I ventured into Shono’s works, clicking on Dropbox folders tidied up as sprucely as any architect’s filing system. I perused files as documentation: drawings as instructions; photographs as status and post-construction records; video clips as installation guides. Nearly all documentation came in black and white, reminiscent of what gets delivered from an architect’s drawing board. Even the color photographs reveal hardly a hue. Reading Shono’s impressively spatial output this way collapses it into representation, into the fundament of the line—black ink across a white canvas.
My introduction to Shono’s work coincided with my ongoing attempt to relate to the line beyond the language of architecture. I sought to foreground the gestural line, what anthropologist Tim Ingold calls the “living line.”2 While the architect’s line might share a genealogical past with the artist’s more gestural line, they are today incompatible. Whereas gestural lines are traces from past movement, thereby signifying how we live in a present shaped by a past, the architectural line strives to claim a future. Some of the earliest gestural lines made by humans are trails across terrains. They express movement and discovery, and they suggest to the next person how to find their way. Therefore, they are a thing and also a medium. In contrast, the architectural line prescribes the work yet to come. Instead of the mind working with the environment, the architectural line activates what Leonardo da Vinci called cosa mentale, the birth of an abstract idea onto the environment.
It might be that my writing here constitutes a personal “reparative reading,” revealing more about myself than the work at hand. Like Shono, I have sat through years of architectural instruction where lines brought forth the lesson. There, the architectural line was ubiquitous and overwhelming. As the basic code of design, it galvanizes toward the work needing to be done. An assembly of architectural lines comes imbued with inherited meaning, a history of manners and praxis. In this way, experience with past architectural drawings informs the way one reads subsequent ones.
An architect, according to architectural historian Nadi Abusaada, learns to read lines like a mapmaker.3 This makes sense: modern cartographers employ lines to carve messy, shapeshifting landmasses into discernible pastel polygons. Architects do not learn from cartographers; the two professions are branches of the same modern profession. Let’s call them the separators. For these professionals (also including engineers, urban planners, and military strategists), lines are drawn as delimiting and strictly bilateral. Rather than guiding one along, these lines enclose to signal a site of design and transformation. They boast the conversion of space and time into absolute abstractions, promising a bounded region that can then be more easily measured and modulated. The architectural line enables a strategy of control and determination. As a sealant against diffusion, it creates the distinction between here and there. The sovereign nation is to a fortress is to a walled garden.4
Muhannad Shono weighs the power of the line. He has observed how the architectural line designs life, through segmenting it into legible and standardized categories. Even if he makes other kinds of lines, architectural lines haunt them. A paradox arises, not a formal but an existential one, quite literally about how one kind of line shows us the world while the other asserts a new world. From there, profoundly, Shono reveals that no line stays in place.
Shono’s passage from architecture to art began with the possibilities of the graphic novel. My familiarity with graphic novels is limited, but I can appreciate how a graphic novelist’s lines can deliver ingenuity so economically. Black and maybe a little wobbly to suggest the creator’s self-doubt, the line of graphic novels expands the compositional possibilities of an ostensibly simple drawing. This type of line can carry the reader across universes; it can whip time up into a soup, or follow it like an arrow.
There is something of the graphic novel in Shono’s Judgmental series (2015), but ultimately these drawings are cautionary tales about the architectural line. They make delightful references to those fantastical architectural proposals that he, like me, probably encountered in architecture school: those by Arata Isozaki, Cedric Price, and Lebbeus Woods, et al., whose inked lines extended out of photographs of the past and onto a blank canvas of the future. Architects who have drafted such unbuildable proposals are often referred to as “paper architects.” Paper here is a restrictive, even dismissive, descriptor, emphasizing that these architects’ work, though celebrated as “visionary,” is condemned to remain on the page. Their lines are stunted; their abstract propositions do not get transposed onto the real world. White paper is the only tabula rasa on offer to the paper architect.
In Judgmental the architectural lines are not by Shono. He draws their catastrophic aftermath: tsunamis of earth and water rip infrastructure out of a city and the sea bed. Designed landscapes, infused with industry and petroleum-powered infrastructure, are thrashed. And lives that depended on infrastructure are cast in peril. Before this apocalypse, architectural lines instructed how to keep buildings and smokestacks functioning; additional lines choreographed the necessary extraction and distribution of natural resources. Architects and engineers had designed these lines as channels isolated from the rest of the world. Their acts had recast space as nodes and spokes, resisting the acknowledgment of other currents of movement. In Judgmental, it is as if these other ways of movement pour forth and shatter the constraints dictated by the constructed world. Like pulling a bindweed out of a garden, peeled away architectural lines cause havoc to ones further down the course, with whirling consequences. Once self-evident, constructed landscapes appear tinny and small in their destruction. Architectural lines, we witness, are just as fantastical as the catastrophe Shono portrays.
Lines in Shono’s site-specific work The Lost Path (2020) are manifested as 65,000 PVC pipes. They recall the cable lines stuffed with fiber optics, omnipresent in our lives but nearly always out of sight. Invisibility endorses the illusion that such infrastructure is merely transmitting, what Tim Ingold calls the myth of “pure transport.” These cables were planted to collapse time and space between points A and B. Here, across a vast tableau, their materiality is unmasked as contemporary life’s debris: cords exposed to photodegradation by the sun. A departing techno-fantasy leaves detritus in its wake.
The Lost Path wove through the desert environs of the ancient caravan city of AlUla in northwest Saudi Arabia. It was the artist’s 2020 contribution to Desert X AlUla, which is an extension of the open-air Desert X biennial in California’s Coachella Valley (USA). These gargantuan art events can frustrate: They are the proof that “land art” can be consumed. Their curators oversee the sprawling of art objects across arid settings. Meant to bedazzle the viewer into reporting on Instagram, the effect renders a smug contrast: in foreground, an illuminative creation (or worse, frivolous recreation) against an unvarying, uncultivable desert backdrop.
Shono’s response, instead, reveals a terrain of integration, if contaminated. The cables snake around boulders, never with a terminus revealed. They tie the surrounding into the work’s narrative. If their exposure to sun has not disabled them, one can imagine that these cables bore further underground and plunge depths of the ocean floor. These lines evoke another material reality, namely that AlUla is connected to the rest of the world. For millennia, the caravan city has been a terrain across which human lines of trade and communication have traversed, binding locations further south in current-day Yemen, to others well beyond Petra, in Jordan to the north. Prior to Desert X, AlUla bore monuments, including those carved by Nabataeans, which spoke more of passage than of “placemaking.”
In the mixed media installation The Fifth Sun (2017) lines find people on the move. An illuminated disc appears scarred, textured, wrinkled like landscape. The work, the viewer is told, is about cycles of life, each terminated by apocalypse before a reset. From the sky above the landscape (the viewer’s vantage point), a black pellet of ink makes impact with the ground, the sound illustrated with percussive music. More pellets fall in succession. Land is blacked by ink that blossoms outward, as ink does when it meets a moist surface. A dense blot reaches out to take on other shapes, splintered into infinite lengthening lines. Ink responds to other ink pellets, recoiling or casting further outward. Earlier works by Shono, especially Children of Yam (2016), reveal a meditation on how ink moves across paper, through its contours of valleys. Paper is not a pure plane but a varied landscape. When letting the ink engage paper, Shono surrenders artistic intention to the material negotiations of ink and paper. He observes their interaction as a record of time, a history.
The Fifth Sun records an interminable entanglement of lines in motion. These are Ingold’s “living lines,” where movement arises as a means of inhabiting. Drops signify how humans appear at a certain location, the splattered ink as an animation of settlement and dispersal. A generation of ink pellets overruns the canvas but eventually disappears, leaving behind the illuminated disc as it was. Today, those of us who accept science envisage the effects of human life on Earth as indelible and consistently noxious. What then can it be that makes human marks simply vanish, when the tiniest piece of plastic outlasts twenty-five generations of humans? That question led me to think of how the Earth knows a different time than we do. The time scale of The Fifth Sun is ensconced in Earth’s deeper time. Also, Earth does indeed absorb much of our actions. We might see many of our impressions on Earth’s surface, but some, perhaps the most caustic, are invisible, or at least atmospheric. Ink in this case, deployed to tell human history, only tells part of the story. Human traces, scoring through landscape, are just as limited in grasping contours of a complete Earth history.
With The Teaching Tree (2022), the artist presented a line as his installation for the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia at the Venice Biennale. Earlier in its life, this line might have been an elegant architectural curve. Sketches for this work reveal that Shono once imagined this line to be made of PVC pipes, like those that coursed through the AlUla desert. His decision to replace cables with blackened palm fronds enacts a spectacular, even ferocious, bursting forth, a disintegrating cornucopia of earthen humus. Once an abstraction constricted to the confines of paper, the line releases into the air of the Biennale’s Arsenale. No longer defining space, it occupies space, by dissolving into billions of other lines. With time, even the most intentional, most suppressed line will seek new forms: form is always in formation.
A decomposing concoction, part putrid biomass, part burnt charcoal: here we have a revealing of how soot ink gets made from plant life. For people living near the Mediterranean Sea, the date palm was integral to a soot ink recipe. The Teaching Tree is an instructional return to ingredients—blackened palm fronds and their ashen remnants on the pavilion floor. Time shatters this line to reveal its elemental history. Ink, one recalls, bears a carbon footprint.
An architectural line has consequences. Conceived across an infinite expanse of a Cartesian imagination, it summons physical transformation. It is instruction for the regimentation of work schedules around the amassing of raw materials. The Teaching Tree warns that the story does not end. Construction is no conclusion. On his website, Shono discloses how this line’s decaying state came to be. An installation video reveals the people and ingenuity required to make the parts come alive, like a monster. Scaffolding is employed. Shono, in the construction of a perishing, reveals the legacies and moralities of the architectural line. And then he waits out its decay.
The line of The Teaching Tree is out of human hands.5 No longer feigning immateriality, it embodies a materiality to be reckoned with, of materials that express their own histories. Decomposition, outward, not inward—like a mushroom’s spore explosion— reveals innards of the architectural line. Sketch models proposed that the line rupture the gallery’s door, its burnt fronds deteriorating into scatterings of black carbonic dust that waft into Venice’s Galeazze Canal. The line returns to its sources. It refuses abstraction, the cosa mentale, as substitute for regenerative decomposition. Instead of relinquishing itself to the slightest mark on a page, it takes over a room. It resists constriction to A–to–B bilateral movement, preferring infinite lives with the environment.
Ancestry of today’s plant-based papers reaches back to lands of the Han dynasty of China (around 200 CE). There, pulp mills were based on manufacturing processes for producing the felt that shrouded nomadic people’s tents. Paper, then, bears a lineage of housing people. It has an architectural history in that it both comes from architecture and, in its use, makes architecture possible. Paper, drawn from architecture, can also create the impression of a tabula rasa, or the promise of zero history. A building process wipes its own slate for the intentions of the black line. Especially in earlier works, for example the body of work for the exhibition The Silence is Still Talking (2019), we observe Shono attend to ink and study how it moves. Lines can manifest as fields, meshes, dispersals. They span outward. Paper, it turns out, merely performs as a tabula rasa. In reality, it is landscape with history: its textures, or imperfections, offer ways for how lines appear, not unlike how land helps shape the course of water. Or how wind disperses seeds. It is impossible to distinguish whose agency lies where.
To conclude, I revisit the only work I have seen by Shono, On Losing Meaning (2021). Having examined the artist’s career through its documentation, I read this work differently now. I encounter it in the oeuvre of black and white, ink and paper. At the Diriyah Biennial in 2021, I witnessed this robotic beast stuttering across a vast plinth, whose raised edges recalled a cage, as if to assuage the viewer’s fear of encounter. At the time, I read the work as a critique of technology and its broken promises, left to flail at a world of all technique and no meaning. Now I read this robot, more tragically, as a monster, and therefore as a tale about us humans. Shono cakes the robot’s extremities with graphite. Like us, it cannot resist being a line maker. The robot moves across a landscape that endures, and records, its movements. The lines left behind—once again of carbonic, sooty compounds—are tentative and seemingly spontaneous. (Of course, there must be algorithms involved, but they’re written to be concealed.) I think again of the earliest lines by humans across terrains, some more visibly lasting than others.
This robot is indeed pathetic. Constantly collapsing on itself, it begs for sympathy. Inscriptions of dust record a history, but one legible neither as designed intent nor as gestural discovery. A resulting drawing exhibits merely the energy expended, the energy both to move the machine and to create the graphite. As the body moves, it releases graphite. Chunks break off. Once again materiality is revealed through its disintegration. Broken graphite, fallen onto the surface, becomes part of that surface. These pieces get crushed by the drawing beast and pressed into making new lines. No longer just white paper, the canvas incorporates the broken trails of past lives, past exertions. Even if one might be duped into believing that white paper provides a tabula rasa, the illusion cannot last long.
A medieval tale comes to mind: of the Mongolians who razed Baghdad’s House of Wisdom in the thirteenth century (CE). The library’s prominence in storing human knowledge might have peaked nearly a half millennium earlier, but its destruction is told as a profound loss of human meaning inscribed onto pages and bound into books. The tale does not so much chronicle the collapse of the building as the breakdown of the knowledge, outward from the walls and back into the world. Pages of destroyed books settled into piles that bridged the Tigris. Below, the river flowed black from the ink released from the pages. Like the line of The Teaching Tree, ink reoccupies its own material histories in the pursuit of new terrains, new forms.
Shono works through the restrictions of architecture’s insistent line, letting his lines find their own way. They will get cut off, become forgotten, and then come back in new form. Inked lines, set onto a cleared surface, have been humans’ most lasting means of communication. They have conveyed information across continents and over millennia. Shono reveals how ink does not control the line and the line does not control the ink. And neither gets to control the surface. An idea, delivered in black and white, does not simply get manifested in the real world. The ink and paper repress, decompose, and even violently retaliate. Every line you draw is an encounter with fate.
1. Works referred to here are The Mind Ship Exodus (2021); The Teaching Tree (2022); The Lost Path (2020); The Unseen (2023); and Return to the Infinite (2021).
2. I am indebted to several works by Tim Ingold that concentrate on the line, including: The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); Lines: A Brief History: With a New Preface by the Author. (London and New York: Routledge, 2016); and The Life of Lines. (London and New York: Routledge, 2015).
3. Nadi Abusaada, “Letter to a young architect,” blogpost, Architectural Review, September 15, 2020. https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/letters-to-a-young-architect/nadi-abusaada-letter-to-a-young-architect [last accessed 16.12.2023].
4. See Zayde Antrim, Mapping the Middle East. (London: Reaktion Books, 2018), 12–15.
5. See Nat Muller’s placement of The Teaching Tree within a history of monsters: “Monstrous Fabulation: The Artistic Practice of Transformation,” The Teaching Tree: Muhannad Shono, Catalogue of the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia, 59th Venice Biennale (Milan: Electa, 2023), 40–49.