The Teaching Tree. The 59th Venice Biennale
The Teaching Tree, a manifestation of the irrepressible creative spirit and an embodiment of a living imagination, one that grows despite teachings that seek to cut it down.
Any restriction on the human mind only creates fertile ground for stronger and more resilient forms of expression. I am exploring ideas of creative resistance and the reforming of our lived world through the power and freeing of the human imagination.
The Teaching Tree fills the length of the pavilion, flowing like a timeline that begins with Shono’s reclaiming of the drawn line and its potential for creation and destruction. Through this, he explores ideas of resilience and regeneration both in the natural world and within human imagination, and how each space can influence the state and forming of the other. Shono’s practice counters the limits of singular narratives, instead questioning truths, ontologies, and the basic concepts underpinning human life. Shono interrogates the impact of writing and the generation of thought, as well as their respective potentials.For Shono, embracing the line and mark making is an act of creative agency. As such, The Teaching Tree builds on central concepts within his practice, questioning the self, tradition, mythology, and the natural world.
“We exist and navigate through cycles of birth and death, destruction and rebuilding, burns and regrowth. We retreat into our minds when we can no longer reconcile the world around us, this is a necessary act of self preservation. In our minds we can imagine new worlds with infinite possibilities. For the imagination is not merely child’s play, It is an infinite resource for good if we can let it take shape, passing from the non-existent within our minds, allowing it to manifest into what we think of as our ‘reality’. “ The artist said.
The exhibition’s curator, Reem Fadda, added, “The Teaching Tree references the drawn line overgrown, now encapsulating a multitude of dimensions. This object becomes emblematic and dichotomous in imaginations represented, words written, and marks engraved, reflecting upon their irreversible effects on history.”
In her essay, Monstrous Fabulation: Muhannad Shono’s The Teaching Tree and theArtistic Practice of Transformation, Nat Muller wrote “Feared and revered, monsters, tend to evince strong emotions. They are the stuff of marvel, trouble us in our dreams, and haunt us when we are awake. They are believed to appear at times of transition: we meet the monster at “a metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment— of a time, a feeling, and a place.”Early into the third decade of the twenty-first century the notion of being at a crossroads is in ample supply, from climate breakdown to political conflict and unresolved societal upheaval. Our planet is under duress, but so is our creative capacity to imagine differently and consequently be in the world differently. True to form, the monster (from the Latin monstrum, to “show”)acts as a portent and reveals these anxieties. In doing so, however, it remain selusive and defies categorisation. Its bodily contours appear aberrant and outside of the natural world, yet never so strange that it becomes fully unfamiliar. There is always a bit of us stubbornly residing in the monster.Even if it messes with the boundaries of what we perceive as cognitively possible, there is a fleeting echo of ourselves that the monster catapults back. Despite all its strangeness, “we love our monsters because through them we indulge our desire for other worlds.” Their mere presence upsets the order of things and makes horizons shift. Because of this, the monster might paradoxically become the most compelling imaginary figure of our time: one that challenges us to confront the darkness of the world while simultaneously imagining new possibilities.”
