Manal Al Dowayan

Biography

Let us begin with the doves. In the installation “Suspended Together” (2011), about two hundred white fibreglass figures hang from the ceiling, and each one carries a printed travel-permission form: the document a Saudi woman was required to obtain from her father, brother or husband. The forms were sent to the artist by women from different parts of the country. The oldest documents are about sixty years old, the newest six months. Among those who gave up their papers were scientists, teachers and engineers.

Manal Al Dowayan was born in 1973 in Dhahran, in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. She did not go to art school: one account gives a master’s degree in systems analysis and design, another a bachelor’s degree in computer science followed by a master’s in Britain. She worked for an oil company, including as a programmer and a creative director. After about ten years she left the job and devoted herself to art alone. Later, in 2018, she completed a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art in London, in contemporary art practice in the public sphere. She began with black-and-white photography. The series “I Am” (2005) grew out of a speech by King Abdullah, newly on the throne, about the importance of women’s participation in the life of the country. The speech was read in different ways, by supporters and opponents of women’s rights alike. Al Dowayan invited women of various professions, from engineers to scientists, and photographed them in their work clothes. For the series “Drive-By Shootings” (2011) she photographed from the window of a moving car: she could not drive herself at the time, a man sat at the wheel, and the pictures came out blurred. I would read them as a statement that one cannot simply step out of a car and take the shot.

In 2012, at the exhibition “We Need to Talk” in Jeddah, her work “Esmi / My Name” was shown. Large wooden worry beads, each bead painted with a woman’s name, hang on a woolen rope woven by Bedouin women. Around four hundred women took part in the workshops and wrote their own full names. The occasion was the notion that it is shameful to say a woman’s name aloud in public. The exhibition was then described as the largest and boldest show of Saudi artists.

In 2014 came “Memory Tree”, in which women drew family trees traced only through the female line, and the documentary work “Shock”, about teachers killed in road accidents. The first was acquired for its permanent collection by Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. Then followed the permanent installation “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t” in the desert at AlUla (2020), the work “O’Sister” (2021), which uses texts from religious manuals of the 1990s on how women should behave in public, and “Oasis of Stories” (2022) in AlUla’s “Wadi AlFann” (Valley of the Arts), built to the scale of the old mud-brick town. In 2023 she performed in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum in New York with “From Shattered Ruins New Life Should Bloom” and was nominated for the second Richard Mille Art Prize. Her work has been shown at the British Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Mathaf. She was visual director of “Thikra: Night of Remembering”, a production by the British choreographer Akram Khan. In 2024 in Venice she showed “Shifting Sands: A Battle Song”, a collective work with the voices of a thousand Saudi women.

Her awards include the Arab Women Awards in art (2014), the BBC’s list of 100 Women (2019) and the Visual Arts Award of the National Cultural Awards of Saudi Arabia (2023).