Hend al-Mansour

Biography

In 2013 Hend al-Mansour made a silkscreen print called “Facebook 1”. In it two women in dark blue chadors sit on a patterned rug. The one nearer the viewer looks straight out and writes in Arabic on an enormous open book with white pages. Behind the book is a red checkered field, a pattern taken from the scarf worn by Saudi men. The second woman sits with her head bowed, and the artist herself calls her a kind of self-portrait: it shows the part of her that used to accept everything as it was, without resistance.

She was born in 1956 in Hofuf, Saudi Arabia. She received her medical degree from Cairo University in 1981. She practised medicine until 1997, in Hofuf and Riyadh, and later said that the profession gave her personal freedom and a sense of self-worth. During that time she gained qualifications in internal medicine and cardiology.

In 1997 she was offered a fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and emigrated to the United States.

In 2000 she left medicine and enrolled at the Women’s Art Institute at St. Catherine University in Minnesota. The following year she became the programme’s teaching assistant. By her own account, it was at the institute that she first seriously answered the question “Who is your audience?” She received her Master of Fine Arts in 2002 from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where her mentor was Aribert Munzner. She works as an installation artist and silkscreen printer, gives public talks, and lives in St. Paul. The main theme of her work is the religious and social belief systems of Arab communities, above all those concerning women, sexuality and understanding the other. She draws on Arabic calligraphy, faces and figures of people, Islamic ornament and architecture. Often these are Muslim women in architectural interiors, shown on silkscreened, dyed or hennaed fabric; stylised figures and faces are interwoven with repeating pattern. She names as her audience first of all people in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, who can recognise her language most easily because she comes from among them. American viewers, she says, often need a long introduction to why her work uses religious and feminist ritual symbols.

The installations are made from large sheets of silk, wool, canvas and other fabrics. They resemble shrines, tents or mosques that the viewer walks into: arches, domes, sand, cushions, rugs, bowls, geometric sculptures, and also distinctive Middle Eastern scents tied to the personalities and cultures of her subjects. I think the smell works here as hard as the image does: it does not let you look from outside.

Her exhibitions began in 2001 with “Heightened Awareness” at the Catherine Murphy Gallery at St. Catherine University. Then came “Arab Eye” (2002), “Sheherazade Risking the Passage”, a show of Muslim women artists (2003), the solo show “The Three Faces of Mary” (2004) and the theatre installation “Peace in the House”, commissioned by Voices of Sepharad (2004). In 2007 the solo exhibition “Fatimah in America” took place, and for the Jawaahir Dance Company she designed and choreographed “Arousat Al-Moulid”. In 2014 the same Murphy gallery showed “How to Be a Feminist Artist” and “The Great Mother of Islam”: the first included passages from the Quran and Arabic textile patterns, through which the artist spoke about the inequality of women. In 2017 she took part in the group show “Radical Love: Female Lust”. Her work has been shown in Minnesota and other US states, as well as in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.