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.

The video unfolds as a loop of interwoven images, each slipping into the next. It drifts from one reference to another, bridging temporalities, geographies, aesthetics, and narratives. The whole installation invites visitors to sit, lie down, and pause. Its scenographic elements and layout evoke spaces of shade and desert architecture, in which every detail serves a practical function while carrying a quiet, deliberate aesthetic.

Hida’s work has long explored how memory and desire survive in fragments, images, objects, gestures that slip between fact and fiction. Here, she builds a setting where the coordinates of plot, belief, and explanation dissolve. What remains is sonic residue, atmospheric drift, handmade clues. The film gestures toward the fabrication of landscapes, trans-Saharan crossings, and post-colonial imaginaries, but it does so with quiet insistence, avoiding spectacle. And the installation doesn’t ask to be understood so much as inhabited. Meaning is not stated; it is stumbled into. Or perhaps, like the circles in the sand, it is something you only recognize by returning.