Published on ft.com | December 5 2019

Saudi artist Manal AlDowayan: ‘My presence is a challenge’

With work on show at this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, the artist discusses the representation of women and the role of politics in art

When the Saudi Arabian artist Manal AlDowayan opened her solo exhibition Watch Before You Fall at Sabrina Amrani gallery in Madrid earlier this year, she encountered a problem. Her multidisciplinary contemporary work — incorporating sculpture, painting and ceramics — explores how Saudi women are represented in public spaces. But the Spaniards who attended her show seemed to know little about the subject: their knowledge of the Middle East was “very surface”, she says, when we meet in her north London apartment-cum-workspace. “It was a big challenge. I’d always opened my shows in my region and people would immediately understand what I’m talking about . . . it wasn’t a western eye. [But in Madrid] I shook things up.”

This week, AlDowayan is shaking things up again in Miami, where her work features in Art Basel Miami Beach’s Positions section this week — a smaller selection of the works shown in Madrid. An American audience presents different challenges. “Will people be like ‘it’s nice but it’s not veils’?” she wonders. “They already have some preset ideas of what I’m talking about and you have to dismantle [them] to get yours across. My presence is a challenge,” she continues. “The way I look, the way I speak, the way I think. I’m a negation of whatever somebody wants to think an Arab woman is.”

With her thick mane of wavy black hair and red lips in a shade matching her painted toes, AlDowayan, 46, is spirited and sagacious in person. It is coincidence that she is in London when we arrange the interview (she has flown in to secure materials for another artwork), as she lives in “three, four locations every year”.

AlDowayan left her job in state-owned oil corporation Saudi Aramco to pursue art full-time in 2010. She has exhibited in Paris, Seoul, New York and Houston. Florida is also familiar ground. After her 2015 residency at the Rauschenberg Foundation on Captiva Island, Florida, she presented a solo show I Am Here in Miami gallery Rojas + Rubensteen Projects, which drew the attention of prominent curators.

Working in mixed media, AlDowayan’s art responds to her personal experiences, mostly of being a woman in Saudi Arabia. Though, she emphasises, she does not attempt to represent all Saudi women. “I’m not a diplomat-slash-artist,” she clarifies. “Preachy is not my thing. I just do what I’m feeling today.” The installation “Suspended Together” depicts a flock of fibreglass doves fluttering overhead, carrying permission documents on their white porcelain bodies; these allow Saudi women to travel under the country’s male guardianship system. Eight years since the piece was made, this law has been removed. “My art is historical now!” she says, proudly.

Saudi Arabia’s tight grip on women’s rights is beginning to ease under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s reforms. The ban on women driving was lifted in 2018, and women’s share of the country’s workforce accounts for 16.8 per cent of total workers, the highest level in almost 20 years. Is this progress? “One hundred per cent,” AlDowayan replies without pause. “There’s a focused effort on including women in everything.”

This cultural metamorphosis, which she nicknames “Saudi 2.0”, is evident in her pieces at Art Basel Miami Beach. They are inspired by imagery on the covers of religious books, written by men, that instruct women on how to behave. Ironically enough, the books, and the ideologies within them, are beginning to disappear from bookshops. “I wanted to find these books that say it’s forbidden for a woman to drive, that it will impact my ovaries, or just leaving the house is sinful — and they’re gone,” says AlDowayan.

On these book covers, women are often depicted as desert roses. AlDowayan takes this fragility and fortifies it through her choice of materials. Her sculpture “I am here” is a 3D-printed sculpture made of acrylic, altering the rose’s ephemeral quality. Her fabric totems appear fragile and susceptible to collapse, but they contain a soft power and resilience. “They drop but they don’t break,” AlDowayan says. “They can be deconstructed and reconstructed to create new meanings.”

In “The Emerging”, black ceramic inverted V-shapes rise up from the ground. They portray the bend of women’s legs — at first they seem menacing, like sharks circling their prey, but they are also flirtatious and transgressive, defiantly visible, revealing part of the female body that is concealed under the country’s strict dress codes. “Women are occupying space and it’s powerful,” AlDowayan says.

This week in Miami, she hopes visitors will engage with her work — “American collectors are the biggest risk takers,” she says. In Saudi Arabia, by contrast, the contemporary art scene is in its infancy. “I think art borders on entertainment there, it’s not fully understood. But there’s no equation for what an art scene should look like or how it should behave,” she stresses.

Yet the opposite is true of Saudi Arabia’s women. Acts of dissent are punished (women’s rights activists such as Loujain Al-Hathloul have allegedly been tortured in prison). Male guardians still govern much of a woman’s life. The country ranked ninth worst out of 149 in the 2018 Global Gender Gap report.

AlDowayan sighs heavily. “The worst, most dangerous thing is to look at somebody else and think ‘they have a shitty life’. We have to examine everything as a whole before we start thinking of othering other cultures.”

There’s a quiet surety to AlDowayan. She seems unburdened by her country’s sociopolitical baggage. “Every move I make is politicised. But you can’t expect the answers from an individual — and never from an artist,” she says. Her work does not seek to ease relations between cultures, countries or even genders. It exists to capture a moment of change in a visual language.