Manal AlDowayan to Represent Saudi Arabia at 2024 Venice Biennale

The Saudi Arabian Ministry of Culture’s Visual Arts Commission has chosen Saudi artist Manal AlDowayan to represent Saudi Arabia at the Sixtieth Venice Biennale, to take place April 20–November 24, 2024. She is the third woman to represent the country in the event, in which Saudi Arabia has participated four times. Active for two decades, AlDowayan through an often participatory practice encompassing photography, sound, sculpture, and installation has investigated Saudi traditions, social politics, and collective memory, as well as the representation and status of women.

She is most widely known for her 2011 installationSuspended Together, a flock of fiberglass birds printed with permission documents. Hanging in midflight, they comment on the restrictions placed on Saudi women wishing to travel without a male companion.RelatedFORMER ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO PAYROLL MANAGER GETS PRISON TIME FOR $2 MILLION EMBEZZLEMENTINUVIALUK ARTIST KABLUSIAK WINS CANADA’S SOBEY ART AWARD AlDowayan was born in 1973 in Dhahran, in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. She grew up in a gated compound reserved for the families of employees of Aramco, the country’s national oil and petroleum company.

Originally trained in systems analysis and design, she began her career working for an oil concern before switching to art. Her early works incorporated black-and-white photography, as embodied by her 2011 series “Drive By Shootings,” a group of blurred photos taken from the passenger seat of a car driven by a man, since she was not legally allowed to drive at the time, owing to her sex. Later works were more participatory in nature, for example 2023’sFrom Shattered Ruins, New Life Shall Bloom, a trove of porcelain sculptures recalling paper scrolls, printed with texts from sources ranging from mass-market magazines to culturally significant literary works related to the oppression of women.

Visitors to New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where the work was displayed, were invited to smash these, reclaiming their own stories. “What motivates her,” Christianna Bonin wrote of AlDowayn inArtforumin 2021, “is .

. . not the ontology of domination but rather the spiraling wind of change.” “My approach to art over the last two decades has given me the chance to be a part of a transformation that is taking place in my country,” said AlDowayan in a statement.

“[The Venice Biennale] presents a rare opportunity to represent where I stand in my practice, positioned in the context of my community, my country, and the world as a whole.”.