JEDDAH — The Athr Gallery is proud to usher in the new year with renowned Saudi artist, photographer and visual artist Manal Al-Dowayan's first solo exhibition titled “A Journey of Belonging” in Saudi Arabia. The exhibition which will start on Jan. 15 will continue until Feb. 15. The month-long exhibition will introduce the new works of the artist as well as seminal work from her previous series, exploring the artist's frequent voyages into the past in search of understanding and mutual acceptance. Al Dowayan is one of the most recognizable and critically acclaimed artist among the new wave of Saudi contemporary artists. She has exhibited globally, from Belgium to Bahrain, from the British Museum, Nadour, Barjeel to the Jordan National Museum of Fine Art, among many others. The talented Saudi artist's show at the Athr Gallery emphasizes not only her profound achievement and success, but re-affirms the Jeddah gallery's commitment to supporting and showcasing the most innovative and thoughtful art of the region. With the artist's different series featured under one roof, a pattern emerges, a common thread weaves itself through her creative works. “A Journey of Belonging” allows the viewer to approach Al-Dowayan's work from a new perspective. There is a paradigm shift in focus with controversial issues of women's rights and identity, normally associated with the artist's work, fading into the background and the artist's personal fears and obsessions coming to the fore. The artist was raised in a land in which the modus operandi revolves around the repulsion and dismissal of women. Specializing in photography, her varied series consistently present meditations on the complex textures of a paradoxically evolving and traditional society, along with a distinct, deep-rooted sense of personal and collective history. Thus, the exhibited works reveal a young woman's obsession with preservation and remembrance, and constitutes a fight against rejection and disappearance. Featured series such as “Pointing To The Future,” “Look Beyond The Veil,” “Landscapes Of The Mind,” “And We Had No Shared Dreams” and “Blinded By Tradition” display Al Dowayan's progression and creative evolution over the years. Through these discrete series of works, Al Dowayan not only explores the role of women in Saudi Arabia but reflects upon a wider reality in which gender equality is symptomatic of power hierarchies, religious dogmas, which interplay with foreign cultures and shifting domestic social attitudes. While her primary medium is photography, series such as “Point To The Future” further demonstrates how the artist amplifies her characteristically monochrome compositions with lyrical visual language. Enriched by this poetic slant, the added layers allow her to weave a rich tapestry of cultural and formal styles that invite deeper consideration of the central themes. Another recurring topic in Al Dowayan's work is the relationship of the individual to their environment. For instance, Al Dowayan explores manifestations of progress and change in the physical textures of the country's geography in “Landscapes Of The Mind,” which uses various locations around the country to frame deft, simple glyphs representing the self and the individual's relationship with her surroundings. The artist places herself amid these symbols, relenting her hold upon her own identity and becoming undefinable and ephemeral against monumental natural and urban settings. Similarly, the series “We Had No Shared Dreams” is a conversation between the inhabitant and the landscape in which she lives, but to which she longs to belong. The inhabitant, like an abandoned child desperately seeks acceptance, but the city only exhales in response. “If I Forget You, Don't Forget Me” reflects on the profound shifts in the Saudi society over the past fifty years, documenting the rise of the oil industry through the individuals who were there at the start of the oil boom. But in this series, Al Dowayan goes beyond a narrative re-telling of contemporary social evolution and instead looks for her own identity amid the turbulent histories of immediately preceding generations, hoping to discover amidst the plenitude of the past, clues and possibilities for the uncertain future. In her latest body of work, Al Dowayan continues to explore the practice of preservation via one of the oldest and time-tested means of documentation, language. In particular, Arabic is a language lauded for its beauty and complexity. The artist adopts as a case study Abu Mansour Al-Tha'alby Al-Naysaboury's “Jurisprudence of a Language: The Secrets of Arabic,” a 10th century Abassid tome that contains detailed categorizations of thousands of Arabic words. In the process, she discovers that what is not rendered useful is actively erased over time, bringing her to question even herself “In my fervour to document my present, am I contributing to a failed formula?” Al Dowayan's work reacts vividly to the restrictions imposed upon women in the 21st century Saudi Arabia. The Athr Gallery have selected works that show Al Dowayan's evolution as an artist, as a Saudi woman and as a lightening rod for sparks and flashes of progress and change within the structures of her environment. Ultimately, it gives a unique and candid perspective of the intense and idiosyncratic relationship that exists between a woman and her homeland, exploring feelings of alienation, belonging, identity, even self-doubt, but above all, love. – SG
