Grounding the Grid: On Saba Innab’s Tread Lightly – Leave no Trace: Paper presented at: ASCA Workshop 2025: Re-Imagining Universality in the Pluriverse, University of Amsterdam, May 26-28

In her essay on grids in modernist art, Rosalind Krauss concludes that “one of the most modernist things about it is its capacity to serve as a paradigm or model for the antidevelopmental, the antinarrative, the antihistorical.” A form uniquely suited to defer the choice between materialist and idealist conceptions of artistic practice, the grid functioned and functions for many artist as “a staircase to the Universal,” and indeed nothing would appear to have universal appeal quite like the grid as a regular representation of Euclidian space. As David Lloyd has demonstrated, however, the apparent formal perfection and innocence of the grid in fact create an “aesthetic terra nullius” that “belies its intimate relation with the quite violent erasure of the persistent traces of historical alterity.” This paper will therefore analyze an exhibition that mobilized the grid not for its appeal to universality, but in order to historicize this appeal itself; Jordanian-Palestinian architect, urban researcher and artist Saba Innab’s Tread Lightly –
Leave no Trace (2023). In this small exhibition, the regularity of the grid was belied not just by the presence of sculptural models that intimate a sense of the “permanent temporariness” that Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti argue to be characteristic of the urbanized refugee camp, but also by carefully selected figurative elements referring to historical articulations of modern and colonial territoriality, such as moments of so-called primitive accumulation and the German peasants’ war. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate, Innab’s practice presented a grounding of the grid—not a straightforward denunciation of its seeming universality, but a critical situating of that universality in time and space.