Where Roots Run Deep takes as a starting point the idea that a place is shaped not only by what appears on its surface, but by the layers of land, memory, culture, and lived experience that give it depth and continuity. Roots are understood not simply as a connection to the past, but as a source of resilience, growth, and the capacity to continually redefine a place.
Riyadh offers a compelling context for this exploration: a city deeply rooted in its land, history, culture, and people, while undergoing profound transformation. Here, the rooted and the emerging exist in dialogue; inherited knowledge meets new possibilities, and the past continues to inform the ways in which the future takes shape. Transformation, in this sense, is not a departure from what came before, but an extension of it.
The symposium invites artists to engage with these ideas through contemporary approaches to land, belonging, identity, memory, transformation, and imprint. The root is not treated as a literal image or fixed metaphor, but as an open and evolving concept that may emerge through material, trace, movement, relationship, experience, or a sense of place.
Through site-responsive making, artists are invited to engage with Riyadh’s physical and cultural landscape, allowing the site and its conditions to become part of the artwork. Material, ground, light, shadow, sound, movement, distance, and human presence may all contribute to how an artwork takes form and is encountered.
The symposium expands the possibilities of sculpture beyond the traditional monument as a fixed and enduring object, embracing contemporary approaches in which artworks can engage with place, memory, environment, and the public realm. Rather than simply representing or commemorating the past, sculpture may create spaces for encounter, reflection, and renewed relationships with it. Works may alter a path, draw attention to overlooked qualities of a site, or create new connections between people and place.
In this way, Where Roots Run Deep becomes an exploration of how what is deeply rooted can generate what is yet to come, how memory can become material, place can become experience, and the traces of the past can open new possibilities for artists to explore our shared future.
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