Hard Stone

In Sange Khara [Hard Stone] (2025), developed for the 36th Bienal, Laila Hida offers a landscape where memory is not narrated, but circled – tentatively, tenderly, with the gravity of something sacred and half-forgotten. The project stages a kind of poetic inquiry where images seem to emerge from a re-constructed memory anchored by a 16mm film and expanded through an immersive installation. Characters cross paths, brought together through a tapestry of iconographic and cinematic references: the young woman from The Wanderers of the Desert (1984), the couple in The Sheltering Sky (1990). Two young guys ride their bikes and strike poses on a dirt road as if freshly cast in a rap video summoning an apparition, a construct of a landscape, the desert, the oasis, and the people who inhabit them, filtered through cinema and image.