Manal AlDowayan: Shifting Sands—A Battle Song

Manal AlDowayan is representing Saudi Arabia at the 60th International Venice Biennale, taking place from April 20 to November 24, 2024, with a multimedia installation entitled Shifting Sands: A Battle Song. This marks Saudi Arabia’s fourth participation in the Biennale Arte and is the country’s third National Pavilion featuring women artists.

Through sculpture and sound Manal AlDowayan tells a story that transcends cultures and geographies asserting an autonomy and solidarity among Saudi Arabian women that will find resonance the world over. The multimedia installation has been informed by workshops held by the artist across Saudi Arabia in Al Khobar, Jeddah, and Riyadh, connecting with over 1,000 Saudi women. Curators Jessica Cerasi and Maya El Khalil and assistant curator Shadin AlBulaihed have worked with the artist on the commission.

A critical witness to the cultural metamorphosis sweeping her home country, AlDowayan’s practice interrogates traditions, collective memories, and the representation of women. In Shifting Sands: A Battle Song, the artist tunes into the energy of Saudi women during a period of profound cultural transformation. In her installation, AlDowayan brings together the sonic and geological features of the desert with the voices of women, in a collective expression that challenges misconceptions about their lives. While this is the first time AlDowayan has explored sound as a medium, what has remained constant within her practice is the unrelenting commitment to empower and uplift the voices of Saudi women, which she has long documented with sensitivity and pride.

Following the structure of Alardah and Aldahha, battle ceremonies traditionally performed by men, the installation is shaped around a central motivating element. Here, it is the voices of Saudi women proclaiming themselves, through song, speech, and drawings. Visitors are invited to wind their way through a maze of large-scale, printed silk, petal-like sculptures that take their forms from the desert rose, a crystal commonly found in the desert sands near the artist’s hometown of Dhahran. Like its crystalline formation, for AlDowayan, a desert rose layers multiple dimensions – it is fragility, ephemerality, femininity, and resilience. As with her earlier desert rose sculptures, AlDowayan marks the “body” of these outsized blooms with text. Here, for the first time, the surface of these sculptures is silkscreened with drawings and writings of workshops’ participants, or texts about Saudi women, sourced from local and international news media. 

AlDowayan says: “At the 2024 Venice Biennale I will attempt to represent where I stand in my practice, positioned in the context of my community, my country, and the world. I present an artwork inspired by the evolving role of women in my country’s public sphere and their ongoing journey to redefine both the physical space they inhabit and the narratives that have historically defined them.

Shifting Sands: A Battle Song builds on my long-standing investigation into the media image and its impact on self-determination, emphasizing the significance of media representations of women, how women are seen in the collective memory of their society, and how profound the impact these images have on perceiving the humanity of the individuals portrayed.

I hope this artwork will encourage women to look within themselves and to lean on their community of women to find their voice and their space within this new chapter in history, much of which is still unwritten.”

Shifting Sands: A Battle Song by Manal AlDowayan for The National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia, commissioned by the Visual Arts Commission: saudipavilion.org