Memory Palace is a sculptural concept developed for the Tuwaik Sculpture Symposium, part of the larger Riyadh Sculpture initiative. Drawing on the ancient technique of spatial memory, this work imagines a timeless architecture—part temple, part landscape—where each passage, portal, and chamber evokes a facet of inner knowing.
The sculpture will be permanently installed in the city of Riyadh, engaging with the region’s terrain and cultural memory. Like a mnemonic structure carved into stone, it invites viewers to walk through their own mental landscapes.
Curated by Sebastian Betancur-Montoya, Senior Public Art Specialist at Qatar Museums, and Dr. Manal Al-Harbi, a leading Saudi sculptor and academic, the 2025 symposium embraced the theme “From Then to Now: Joy in the Struggle of Making.” This curatorial vision celebrated the artistic process as a journey, highlighting the fusion of heritage and innovation in contemporary sculpture.
I’m deeply grateful to Salam Bolman, whose generous insight and support first brought this opportunity to my attention.
This project continues my broader exploration of symbolic architecture and internal geographies, rooted in the visual language of The King’s Cartographer series.
artist statement:
Dimensions: 300 cm x 200 cm x 100 cm
Memory Palace, is a 3-meter high granite structure that explores the evolving layers of memory and identity. The piece is defined by negative spaces carved out of a living quarried block of granite, revealing archways, facets, and entrances. This
kaleidoscopic intersection of viewpoints reminds the audience of their part in creation itself. These voids represent the thresholds and portals of our collective and individual memories, our liniages and our relationship to them. An aggregate creation of existence and circumstance. Like a city, architectural archetypes leave space or us to inhabit in harmony to reflect and grow a tapestry in time. Memory Palace challenges the traditional concept of memory as a static, internalized repository. Instead, it proposes an ever-evolving edifice, incomplete, dynamic and growing, much like the fluid nature of our thoughts and perceptions as an individual and a community. Free and with reverence for our ancestry the sculpture feels both evolutionary and ancient. Rough textures created by chisels are softened and smoothed, polished as if by rivers of life, symbolizing that the process of creation continues into and enels of past and future. The viewer, not a passive observer but a participant adding to the palace in as many ways as there are lives to live. in alignment with the symposium’s theme, this piece not only stands as a monumental structure but also as an invitation for introspection, connection, and the communal creation of meaning through the act of remembering. Memory Palace is a shared architecture of thought, embodying both the permanence of granite and the ongoing, fluid nature of memory, continually shaped by those who engage with it.