The Eternal Return of the Same: Manal AlDowayan

The Eternal Return of the Same includes mixed media sculptural works inspired by the intricate form and occurrence of the desert rose. AlDowayan’s practice reimagines the body’s renegotiation with space, here she considers women’s new freedoms in daily life and society in Saudi Arabia. Grappling with these unreconciled and often oppressive histories now being rapidly erased from collective memory.

PART OF A GENERATION DEEPLY IMPACTED BY CONSERVATIVE LAWS AGAINST WOMEN IN SAUDI ARABIA, ALDOWAYAN TEASES OUT A NEW TENSION IN O SISTER (2021), RAISING QUESTIONS ABOUT PHYSICAL EMANCIPATION AT THE VER MOMENT THE KINGDOM OSTENSIBLY MOVES TOWARDS GREATER SOCIAL FREEDOMS.

A large soft sculpture, Ephemeral Witness (2020), hangs like a heavy cloud or punching bag. It is made up of folding, padded layers of silk. Its layers make up a weighted anthropomorphic, puffy, and spiral-shaped mass. Some layers are laden with a dark Arabic text inscribed upon them, which the artist culled from instructional publications – Al Dowayan describes them as how-to’s for women’s behavior in public.

The Recline (2020) contemplates art history’s reclining nude: An incomplete weaving project, the tapestry is barely hanging, unsure whether it is coming undone or becoming a woven piece, its gaps and disproportionate composition signal an indecisive turn where a new image, even if imperfect and askew is coming into view.

The Suspended Palm series takes cues from two overlapping narratives experienced by AlDowayan, underpinned by a common theme of displacement and a moment of transition. 

Just Paper (2021) also captures a moment of change. The sculptures appear as rolled up scrolls of paper but are made of fragile porcelain. Extracted from a book on the jurisprudence of the Arabic language written over a thousand years ago, Weeping, tight, and laying are also rolled into crushable porcelain scrolls, their fragility offering an easy and rapid catharsis if only one would tighten their grip.

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.

AlDowayan’s practice reimagines the body’s renegotiation with space, and while the world struggles through the pandemic, women in Saudi Arabia have been seeing newfound freedoms in daily life and society. From women-only spaces, once loud, free, and powerful, to shared spaces in public and at work with men.