Manal AlDowayan: Activist Practice
The role of women through dialogue and documentation
Manal AlDowayan, From the series The Choice, The Choice II (2005). Courtesy of the artist.
With text by Laura Barlow, curator.
In 2005, Manal AlDowayan made her first series of black and white photographs, The Choice, becoming one of the first contemporary artists in Saudi Arabia to take a publicly feminist and activist position. In her work she directly addressed debates on the position of women in society, identity preservation and structures of power.
“In the beginning I was speaking to women— that’s what I was conditioned to do—and that’s why I still do this, to work with and to speak to women,” explains AlDowayan of the series shot in her Dhahran studio, when working full time for Saudi Aramco. The six portraits of the artist’s female friends and colleagues show each holding an everyday object wearing the abaya and shayla as well as traditional jewellery and henna tattoos. These reference, literally and through creating visual associations, the urgent conversations women in Saudi Arabia were having about female suffrage, guardianship and the right to drive. These works express a deep personal engagement with her own feminist community and discourse and distinguish themselves as contemporary documentation of the strength within the peer-to-peer feminist community rather than one-liners intended to empower women, or protest against the male gaze.
Women’s collaborative and communal activism in Saudi Arabia has continued to drive AlDowayan’s holistic research and participatory practice, as well as being the subject of her work. The photographic series I am... (2005) holds at its core the communal energy, spirit and trauma of the women who participated in the project’s production process. These include doctors, academics, creative thinkers, mothers and others, from her existing networks, connections and conversations, who collaborated with AlDowayan. This renders visible the unique self-organized system of counter-structures led by women, for women. AlDowayan defines this as the “counter public” of collective networks that grew from the need for physical and intellectual spaces of coexistence and critical thinking.
I am... (2005), one of the artist’s most identifiable series of black and white photographs, is a collection of portraits that identifies individual women with roles and positions held in Saudi society. It captures their portraits wearing traditional jewellery that is obstructive. This disruptive aesthetic highlights the absurdity of the forced insertion of ritual and tradition in situations where it does not exist, neither historically nor in contemporary life.
In 2009, AlDowayan began working outside of her studio. During this time she started shooting the urban infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, exploring the role and the spatial capacity of her context, while locating and abstracting her place, as well as of other women within it. The lens becomes more objective, rendering transparent the burdensome, bureaucratic layers of everyday life which conceal and limit the mobility of women. In Landscapes of the Mind (2009), female silhouettes, birds and clock faces, symbols of movement and measuring, are silk screened over barren scenes of industrial Dhahran, the artist’s home town and the administrative centre of oil production in Saudi. AlDowayan’s limited access to the public sphere as a woman and photographer shapes the making of And We had no Shared Dreams (2010). Shot from rooftops and the back of a moving car, by placing collages and prints of (again) the dove, women’s faces or an eye, AlDowayan seems to denote everyone else’s existence, without any recognition of individual women.
These scenes, from the imagination of AlDowayan and women’s minds, re-claim the power of the constructed image or articulate a representation of a reality which has been erased from society. Claiming power of the constructed image upends the power dynamics which control the physical and metaphorical spaces women inhabit. Fixated with exploring the double bind, what she terms the ‘hyper-visibility’ of Saudi women, the awareness of Saudi women as a monolithic group and their parallel invisibility as individuals, these works challenge the systematic denial of women’s visibility as constructed by existing systems of power.
Her father’s passing in 2011 and the deterioration of his memory from Alzheimer’s that preceded this, triggered an exploration of the psychology of memory as well as of active remembering and forgetting referred to in her work If I Forget you, Don’t Forget Me (2012). Reconfiguring her reading of the logic of representation, AlDowayan takes specific issue with the constructed psyche of women’s representation and their presence in society by unravelling the image shaped by the media, specifically the media’s erasure of women in photographs to deny of the female collective presence. Creating her own images and photographs AlDowayan fights the media using their own language. Progressing this line of thinking, in The State of Disappearance (2013) AlDowayan shifts from an exploration of the (in)visibility of Saudi women to a process of working that uses the image as a tool to construct the identity of women and actively preserve the memory of women’s existence, in this instance through an exploration of Arabic language.
The research based project Crash (2014) projects a collective voice and visual language to commemorate female teachers in Saudi Arabia who passed away in road accidents on the way to work. Exposing the void of communication around the identity of these women in mainstream Saudi media and the proliferation of such images, AlDowayan experiments with the images of the crash sites, distorting and re-articulating the photograph. Questioning the psychology behind the media’s repeated exclusion of their identities from their reportage and the subsequent desensitization to the memory of these women, the project opens discussions about traditional and future perspectives on Saudi Arabia’s social and political positioning of women, pushing against the active erasure of women’s collective memory.
The discursive nature of AlDowayan’s projects is indicative of her commitment to education—a key characteristic that stems from her own education and empowering attitude. AlDowayan’s playful taunting of the photograph does not sidestep the inscribed, heavy history of documentation and representational theory attached to this medium. Instead it wages an embattled claim for the necessity to retain the core structures and intentionality as well as the purpose of the act and longevity of seeing, documenting and recording. As a woman, as an artist, and primarily as a photographer with women as her subject, AlDowayan’s emotive images stop and ask, how to reconcile an image that has no record of its maker, and no memory of its subject? This is not only a fight against active erasure, but a necessary homage to the collective memory and active presence and right for women to make, record and circulate a progressivist contribution to their context. Here the image and representation of themselves in that context is driven by inconsistency and manipulation of tradition and progressivist ideals. This commitment to documenting the lives of Saudi women is needed more than ever as surface changes attempt to erase their recent history.