Artist Manal Aldowayan On Recontextualising The Arab Woman For The 60th Venice Biennale

For Saudi Arabian artist Manal Aldowayan, transformations have been a lifelong fascination. She bares sensitive yet critical witness to the cultural changes happening within the Kingdom

“There has always been a creative community within Saudi Arabia, bubbling under the surface,” Manal tells Bazaar Arabia. “What has changed now – in the past five years or so – is that the leadership of the country has really put art and culture at the heart of their agenda for the future.”

Manal Aldowayan is in a reflective mood as she ponders the fact that she’s representing her country, and herself, to the rest of the world as the artist chosen to execute the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia at the Venice Biennale for its 60th edition.

“I think we’re having a moment of transformation, as a people and as a country,” she continues. “When things are changing and shifting within a society, this can be very uncomfortable for a lot of people. Change is hard, and art is an excellent way to help reconcile and process that change. This is how we deal with our history, understand what we are going through and enable dialogue in a safe space.”

Manal’s artistic practice is primarily grounded in concept, rather than a specific discipline or material. The meaning acts as the pillar of an artwork, with the materiality changing to reflect the meaning. In this way, she is not tethered to any specific style. “Photography was the first phase I went through, but I felt it was two-dimensional and flat,” she explains. “In my later works, I got rid of the frame and the glass. I would add silkscreen printing; neon; spray-paint. Then, eventually, I moved away from this two-dimensionality.”

“I started creating installations that you have to experience with your body,” she continues. “You have to go into it; touch it; feel it; smell it. You feel the scale. This has become the sort of thing that I love making.”

At the same time, her work is often self-reflective and deeply personal, seeking to reconcile aspects of her own identity within a historical and societal context that is constantly shifting.

“You have to remember that Saudi Arabia… has been changing constantly “

Manal Aldowayan

“You have to remember that Saudi Arabia has never had a calm moment,” she muses. “In truth, it has been changing constantly. The introduction of oil changed the lives of my father’s generation. Some of them were Bedouins. Some of them were farmers. Some were immigrants from Palestine. The experiential gap between my mother and I is huge. The gap between my niece and I is huge; as a bedtime story, she asks me to tell her about when the religious police used to chase me; for her, it’s a fantasy; it’s not real. It shows how Saudi Arabia has been transformed and is transforming itself.”

For the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia, presented at Venice Biennale 2024, Manal created ‘Shifting Sands: A Battle Song’, a multi-media artwork inspired by Al-Dahha – a traditional Arabic men’s dance with pre- Islamic roots that extend from Saudi Arabia to Jordan, Palestine and Iraq – where a male chorus is led in song by a dancer or poet.

According to legend, when the Persian army invaded Arab lands, the Arab tribes were able to frighten away their enemies by performing Al-Dahha, mimicking the sounds of fearsome animals and tricking the outnumbering Persian forces into retreating. Today, Al-Dahha is performed at celebrations such as weddings and national events.

Manal recreates this traditional performance in installation, using banks of speakers lining the sides of the pavilion to represent the chorus, which flank a collection of three large-scale sculptures.

“I went to three different cities in Saudi Arabia – Al Khobar, Jeddah, and Riyadh – where I ran participatory sessions where I showed women images of articles written about the Saudi woman,” she explains. “And I asked them: Is this the kind of language that you think describes you? Is this a language that you want to describe you? I gathered their drawings and statements, and I chose the strongest ones and asked them to read them out loud.”

These readings, echoing the call and response style of Al-Dahha performance, are then combined with natural sounds taken from the dunes of the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula – a phenomenon that occurs in only a few deserts around the world – resembling long, loud, droning notes, which are then harmonised with singing, again performed by Manal’s female participants.

“You enter the pavilion space and hear the sound of women. You don’t see them – they’re invisible – but the sound occupies your body. You have no choice. Their presence is there, confirmed through that act. And then you have the sculptures; the first thing you see is the visual cacophony of the media. As women have always navigated public spaces, you have to navigate the artwork itself with your body and find the women’s voices, and then you will find the heart of the artwork; their drawings and their statements.”

The sculptures themselves are based on the form of the desert rose; a crystalline formation that has captivated Manal. As a child, she would spend the spring hunting for them, close to her mother’s house. In adulthood, she finds herself returning to them, recontextualised into a symbol for her own experiences of womanhood and representation.

“When I was looking at the transformation of Saudi Arabia and the status of women, specifically I was looking at graphical representations of women,” she says. Instead of using her image, the graphics that always represented the Muslim woman was a delicate English rose. They would literally put a flower over her face.”

“I was thinking about the image of this poor, delicate flower; its petals just about to fall off; its water about to run out,” she continues. “There is a will to maintain this orientalist view of how Saudi women look and behave. This does not represent me. Looking at the desert rose – a beautiful crystal that is formed under very harsh circumstances – I felt this was a much more appropriate representation of Arab women, and that’s what I brought to Venice.”

Images: Supplied

From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s July/August 2024 issue.