The desert is often imagined as an empty place: a vast expanse of sand, stone and silence. Yet for artists who know these landscapes closely, it is anything but vacant. The desert holds memories, stories and entire ecosystems. Its surface is constantly rewritten by wind and water, while its rocks preserve traces of geological processes that began long before us. For these artists from the MENA region, the desert is not simply a dramatic setting. It is a material, a living environment and a way of thinking about movement, survival, disappearance and time.

For Saudi artist Muhannad Shono, the desert is a place where nothing remains completely still. In What Remains, long strips of fabric saturated with local sand stretch across the landscape. Exposed to the wind, they shift, drag and gather new traces of the ground around them.

The work is inspired by the same aeolian forces that continuously form and reshape desert dunes. Rather than presenting the landscape as something fixed, Shono allows it to become a collaborator. Wind determines the movement of the installation, while sand gives it weight, texture and colour.

This instability also carries a deeper meaning. The changing surface becomes a metaphor for memory, identity and belonging — things that can rarely be contained within permanent borders. Like a dune, they are repeatedly displaced and rebuilt. The question suggested by the title is therefore deliberately difficult to answer: after the wind has passed and the landscape has changed again, what truly remains?

Water and desert are often treated as opposites, but in Palestinian-Iraqi artist Sama Alshaibi’s Silsila, they are part of the same interconnected story. Created over eight years, the multimedia series (42 photos and 8 videos) emerged from the artist’s journeys through desert landscapes and endangered water sources across the Middle East and North Africa.

Its title means “chain” or “link” in Arabic, referring to the geographical and ecological connections that stretch across the region. Alshaibi photographs and films her own body within these environments, using it to explore migration, borders, displacement and the growing scarcity of natural resources.

Throughout the series, the desert is both physical and symbolic. It is crossed by historic pilgrimage and trade routes, but also by contemporary political borders that restrict movement. Water appears as a source of life, spirituality and shared dependence — something that connects communities even as national boundaries divide them. Through this relationship, Silsila presents the desert not as an isolated emptiness, but as part of an environmental system in which every place and every body is linked.

At first glance, desert rocks can appear static and lifeless. Kuwaiti artist Aseel AlYaqoub looks more closely. Her installation Weird Life: An Ode to Desert Varnish is inspired by desert varnish, a thin, dark coating that develops over extremely long periods on exposed rock surfaces in arid environments.

The precise formation of desert varnish continues to raise scientific questions. Minerals, dust, microorganisms, moisture and wind may all contribute to the process. By focusing on this mysterious surface, AlYaqoub challenges the familiar perception of the desert as a place where very little happens.

She enlarges and reimagines the phenomenon through sculptural forms, making a nearly invisible natural process impossible to overlook. The work draws attention to forms of life and transformation that exist beyond ordinary human perception. What appears to be a bare stone may contain a complex record of biological activity, mineral accumulation and environmental change.

Lebanese artist Caline Aoun’s The Desert Has No Surface begins with basalt stones collected from the volcanic plateau of Harrat al-Sham. One side of each stone is polished until it becomes reflective, catching flashes of sunlight that appear and disappear as viewers move around the installation.

The work’s title questions the idea that the desert has one stable, clearly defined surface. In reality, the landscape is constantly transformed by light, air, dryness, humidity, heat and human perception. Even the apparently solid rocks contain records of movement and change.

Aoun contrasts the physical weight and geological permanence of basalt with the fleeting reflections created across its polished surface. Depending on the viewer’s position and the conditions around the work, the stones may appear bright, dark, visible or almost absorbed into the landscape.

Here, the desert becomes a space in which permanence and instability coexist. Its materials may be ancient, but the way we experience them changes from one second to the next.