Shadia Alem

Biography

In 2011 Saudi Arabia came to the Venice Biennale for the first time, and among its artists was Shadia Alem. Her “The Black Arch” was a dark cube suspended on one corner above a sea of iridescent spheres. The work covered about 350 square metres; visitors were invited to walk around it, and the spheres, as conceived, stood for travellers of every kind. The black is no accident here: it is the colour of the cloth on the Kaaba, of the silhouettes of veiled women and of the sacred Black Stone. Alem made the project together with her sister, the writer Raja Alem. That same year her work was included in the exhibition “Hajj” at the British Museum in London.

She was born in Mecca, by some accounts in the district of Misfalah. The year of her birth is given variously as 1970 and 1960; it cannot be established with certainty.

Her childhood was spent in Taif, where, it is reported, she painted on doors from an early age. Her father was a calligrapher and her mother embroidered. Alem later took a bachelor’s degree in art and English literature at King Abdulaziz University.

By some accounts her work has been exhibited since 1985; by others she became known in Saudi Arabia in the early 1990s, when she took part in national exhibitions. She is a member of two associations in Jeddah, the House of Visual Artists and the House of Photographers. From the late 1990s she was shown in Europe and Asia. In 1998 the airline British Airways chose her work “Youm al-Suq” for the livery of its aircraft. A solo exhibition was held in 1999 at the Rochan Gallery in Jeddah. In 2000 “Jinniyat Lar” was shown at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris, then at the National Museum of Saudi Arabia in Riyadh and at a gallery in Beirut. In 2002 she took part in “Babel 2002” at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul. By some accounts, her project “Everything Has Changed” was shown in 2004 at a museum in Montparnasse, Paris; in 2005 the Kunstmuseum in Bonn held “Languages of the Desert” (Sprachen der Wüste), an exhibition of art from six Gulf states. Later came “Edge of Arabia” in London in 2008 and, alongside the Venice Biennale, in 2009, Istanbul in its 2010 Capital of Culture programme, and the 6th Berlin Biennale.

Part of Alem’s work speaks about the position of women in Saudi Arabia: her forms convey the anxiety under which women may live. The installation “Negative No More” consists of five thousand photographic negatives, none of which shows a woman. In this way she points out that women have been absent from the country’s political history. In 2011 she and her sister discussed this in Vogue Italia; Alem addresses gender in her art, while her sister regards her own prose as genderless.

A retrospective at the Albareh Gallery in 2007 showed how her work had changed, from portraiture to landscape and photography. It seems to me that this breadth of techniques, rather than a single manner, best describes her path.

The same year, 2011, also brought losses: fifteen years of work was lost in a flood in Jeddah, and a computer failure destroyed five more projects. Today Alem lives and works between Paris and Jeddah.