Nora Adwan 

Born 1983, United Kingdom 

Lives and works in Bergen, Norway 

Pomegranates/Rumman 2021/2026 

sound, ceramics, glass, humidity sensor 

Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and Rubaiya Qatar, Qatar Museums with generous assistance from Office for Contemporary Art Norway, and British Council in Sydney, and support from Bergen Kommune & Kulturrådet 

Courtesy of the artist 

Humidity sensors guide sound through the more than 100 unglazed ceramic pomegranates that make up Nora Adwan’s Pomegranates/Rumman. Replicating the bi-fold English and Arabic words of its title, Pomegranates/Rumman features sounds from Norway where the artist lives, and Jordan where her family resides. If the sensors, installed outside of Penrith Regional Gallery, detect the air is wet, the pomegranates emanate dry sounds recorded in Jordan; if the weather is hot, they shift to wet sounds recorded in Norway. If the weather is in between the two compositions are blended. 

An invocation of the yearning for home, the dual self and the discombobulation of displacement, Pomegranates/Rumman relies upon the pomegranate as a symbol of eternal life and abundance, the seed of which is known to alleviate pain.  Including hundreds of hand cast glass pomegranate seeds, Pomegranates/Rumman balances the ancient and contemporary, the cool and warm, distant and near to mediate on the fragmentation of exile.