Manal AlDowayan

Embracing diverse media, Manal AlDowayan's artistic practice revolves around themes of invisibility, active forgetting, archives, and collective memory, with a large focus on the status of women and their representation.

In the past 20 years of her career she has been awarded several commissions that produced engaging work that both question the status of society and at the same time it tells its stories. Manal is also a pioneer in the use of participatory art in her region and has created major installations using this form of art making. This includes her works Esmi/My Name, Tree of Guardians, Suspended Together and Sidelines. Manal has represented Saudi Arabia at the 2025 Venice Biennale.

Her work has been exhibited regionally and internationally in institutions such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, USA (2023); the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada(2023); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA (2023); Misk Art Institute, Saudi Arabia (2023, 2022); Setouchi Triennale, Japan (2022); Louvre Abu Dhabi, UAE(2023); Diriyah Biennale, Saudi Arabia (2022); Taehwa River Eco Festival, Korea (2021); Victoria & Albert Museum, UK (2021); British Museum, UK (2021); Desert X AlUla, Saudi Arabia (2020); the Aga Khan Museum, Canada (2018); Institut du monde arabe, France (2017); the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE (2016); Santander Art Gallery, Spain (2016); Prospect New Orleans, USA (2014); Gwangju Museum of Art, South Korea (2014); Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar (2014);among others.

Her works can be found in the collections of the British Museum, UK; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; the Centre Pompidou, France; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, USA.

She participated in the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, USA (2015), and the artist-in-residence program at the Delfina Foundation, UK (2009).

Manal holds a Masters of Art in Contemporary Art Practice in Public Spheres from the Royal College of Art. Actually lives and works between London and Daharan.

Credit：MAD Studio

Sidelines. Twill cotton with treated wool thread and aluminum frame.200 x 200 x 400 cm.2016. Sadu weaving is one of the ancient traditional Bedouin crafts in the Arabian Peninsula, recognized by UNESCO as an intangible cultural heritage in both the Kingdom and Kuwait. This intricate craft, typically maintained by Bedouin women across different Gulf countries, involves using traditional looms to weave wool into complex geometric patterns. These patterns often feature bright colors contrasted with darker hues, showcasing the artistic depth and cultural significance of the craft. Despite being a national craft, the community of women who are the guardians of this knowledge and the skilled crafters often live in poverty. Since 2016, Manal has been collaborating with these communities on various projects, integrating their craft into diverse artworks. The initial project,"Sidelines," is an installation that highlights the lives of these women, where they weave and then unweave to make a poignant statement about their situation and to bring visibility to their work.
Sidelines Art Statement of 2016: There exists a generation of woman who were, at one point, known artisans among their communities and through the fast paced modernization of Saudi Arabia and the active urbanization of Bedouins, have lost their craft and fallen into poverty. I aim to highlight the unique beauty of their craft but juxtapose it against the neglect that these women have suffered. In my artistic practice I work extensively with the idea of active forgetting and disappearance of communities and groups. I explore new ways of producing a portrait of an individual or a group. For example, in “ If I forget you, don't forget me” a project that documents a small community of oilmen and women who witnessed the transformation of Saudi Arabia from extreme poverty to extreme wealth. I also collected sound files of folktales, poems, and conversations of women who participated in “The Tree of Guardians” which focused on the development of women- only family trees to negate the traditional patriarchal family tree. But there were two projects that I had worked on in the past that have led me to develop this proposal. The first was “ Esmi – My Name” where I had Bedouin Sadu weavers help me build ropes and design elements for the installation that resulted from this participatory art work and secondly, a small story that I was commissioned to photograph for Saudi Aramco World magazine documenting the art of Nagsh in Abha. I am constantly drawn to the inclusion of crafts in my research and eventually in my artworks. This is because I have found that in the Arabian Peninsula, crafts are mainly designated as work done exclusively by women, not because it suited their nature or because an authority deemed it to be, it was because the social fabric she belonged to found a balance of duties that included women as equal contributors to the livelihood of the family or the larger tribe.
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