Manal AlDowayan, The Emerging, 2021

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Installation of 30 jesmonite casts and black wax

Variable dimensions

AlDowayan slyly employs materials that almost contradict the object depicted. The Emerging (2021) is a series of thirty jesmonite casts. Unevenly textured, pocked with finger marks and smoothed over by hand, the cluster of distinct floor-bound appendages of body parts question how women are renegotiating their bodies and the spaces they inhabit. As they are increasingly joining the Saudi public sphere, away from the ‘counterpublic,’ exclusively female enclaves of empowerment, women are forced to (re)claim a stake in the patriarchal arena. More than an innocent celebration of ‘our time has come’, the repeated single, imperfectly cast bodily eruptions in The Emerging suggest that the movement from one space to another, while forceful, is still tenuous: women in the Kingdom must reprocess not only positions, but their bodies and voices within them.

The Eternal Return of The Same: Manal AlDowayan

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The Emerging, 2021