Why You Need To Know These Radical Saudi Feminist Artists

Since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman came into power in 2013, his roll out of culture initiatives and the 2030 Vision have been controversial and much debated. But a group of Saudi women artists say they’ve been creating radical art for decades.

The darkroom was a secret until Manal Al Dowayan found it. She’d been working at Aramco in the east of Saudi Arabia for ten years when one day she discovered a state-of-the-art photography studio in a remote corner of her office building. It was completely empty, cold and a little dusty from years of sparse use. Built by the Saudi Arabian oil company Aramco in the 1990s, they had “really used the best quality technology, it was incredibly sophisticated” Al Dowayan tells me, “but it looked like no one had used it for decades, if at all. So, I decided to experiment, and that was really my first step into art.”

It was 2005, a time in which less than ten percent of Saudi women were employed in the workforce, compared to 2021 when according to the Brookings Institution 33 percent of Saudi women were in employment. “At that time, when things were so different for Saudi women, I wanted to create art on my own terms,” Al Dowayan explains, “that was incredibly important to me. Women really weren’t public at all at the time so I decided to use photography to look at the role of women in the public sphere in Saudi Arabia. That exploration has always been the motive behind my work.”

Al Dowayan titled the pictures I Am, a series of black and white photographs of Saudi women and their dreams for future careers. I Am A… Driver shows a woman gazing at her own reflection in a car wing mirror, another I Am A… Writer, shows a woman writing a book. The images the artist created reflect the environment for women in Saudi Arabia at the time, over two decades before women were granted permission to drive, work and travel independently without permission of a male guardian in 2019.

Twenty five years later, Al Dowayan’s I Am series has recently found a new global audience. Discovering the artist on social media, a new wave of fans across the world have become interested in the unique view Al Dowayan’s art offers into a time when Saudi Arabia was “completely closed off to the world”, as the Saudi government attempt to reposition the global view of women’s rights in the country through tech, sport and art programming.

Al Dowayan calls the women in her photographs the “counterpublic”, a community spirit among women that she believes developed over the last thirty years among Saudi Arabian women. “There is an incredible feminism in the counterpublic” she tells me, “before 2018, when women were in the public space, it wasn’t really our space at all. Women existed in their own realm entirely until a few years ago. Before that, the public space was very much the male space.”

Al Dowayan wasn’t alone in her exploration, over the last three decades, a group of female artists have been contributing to a feminist Saudi Arabian art movement that has offered a rare insight into the social and political conditions impacting women in the country. As a new swathe of cultural programming attracts attention to Saudi Arabia, women artists including Al Dowayan, Lulwah Al Homoud and Filwa Nazer are finding they’re getting long overdue recognition for the pivotal role their work has played in protest art history – but far from being a new trend, they’ve been communicating with the world through their art for decades.

Since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman came into power in 2013, his roll out of culture initiatives and the 2030 Vision have been controversial and much debated. Promoted by the Saudi Arabian government as progress, to critics, the 2030 Vision has prompted accusations of what the independent organization Human Rights Watch call an attempt to “enhance the image of the Kingdom internationally” in their 2021 World Report. “Regardless of the modest rise in numbers of women in employment, the main challenges have not changed from when I took these photographs I took in the 1990s”, Al Dowyan says, “there is change but it’s impact women of different social and economic levels differently.”

Born and raised in Saudi Arabia, and now a successful artist, Al Dowyan believes that it’s through art that Saudi women have historically been able to be more vocal against the state. Today, the artist and her peers – women in their 20s, 30s and 40s – uphold values in their work that remain completely separate to those of the Saudi state.

Lulwah Al Homoud is an artist and curator who was born and raised in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. She works largely in graphic calligraphy and digital installations, and her art was exhibited at the first ever international Saudi Art Biennial, Misk Art Week – run by the independent art foundation Misk, who have recently unveiled the first ever public art research library in Saudi Arabia – and over the last year she’s doubled her private sales. “I’ve always had collectors from across the world, my community was established far before the announcement of the 2030 vision”, she says.

At Misk Art Week, Al Homoud held a live screen printing class where she took over half of the ground floor of the Prince Faisal bin Fahd Arts Hall in downtown Riyadh. Basma Al-Shathry, the director of Misk, calls Mahmoud a “radical, a true innovator who has long had an international fanbase, years before Saudi Arabia opened up.” Al Homoud views her success at Misk Art Week as a tool to encourage other Saudi women to become artists themselves. Throughout the fair, which attracted thousands of locals as well as international visitors from art institutions including the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Al Homoud spoke about the ways that her art is “not a new trend, but the result of years of research, work and education — I’ve been an artist for decades.” Al-Shathry says “Mahmoud’s persistence to her art, decades before the world was looking at Saudi women artists is admirable.”

As a young woman growing up in Riyadh, Al Homoud faced discrimination daily for being a woman and her art has always offered her a way to connect with the wider world and communicate the realities of living through traumatic conditions. “My childhood was a different world to what we are starting to see today in Saudi Arabia” she says. “I do remember being stopped regularly by the religious police. They would make up any excuse to stop women and harass them, it was not a good time” she says, “because of this I went to London to study art at Central St Martins and it was only there that I was really able to develop my practice.”

I spoke with Huda from the Human Rights Watch who has spent the last five years researching the way human rights in Saudi Arabia intersect with the recent increase in cultural programming in the country. She suggests that following the high profile arrest of writer and civil rights campaigner Loujain al-Hathloul, being an artist with the range of social commentary that comes with it is difficult in the current political and social climate in Saudi Arabia. “It can feel uncomfortable for some women in Saudi Arabia to see the promotion of liberal creative values as part of the 2030 vision because many feminist creative women have been imprisoned for activism or fled the country” she says, “people are still afraid to speak about their values publicly when there is a lack of opposition movements.” Al Homoud says she has always seen her art and that of her “peers like Filwah Nazer and Manal Al Dowayan” to articulate the truth of women’s lives in Saudi Arabia.

Recently, Al Homoud curated the show What Lies Beneath, which showcased the work of seminal Saudi Arabian women from the private collection of art collector and curator Basma Al Sulaiman. In What Lies Beneath, work by female artists Manal Al Dowayan, Shadia Alem, Nasser Al Salem and Dana Awartani came together for the first time to illustrate a part of feminist art history that’s been largely overlooked. “It was a lifetime’s ambition” Al Sulaiman says of the project, “the artworks by these women deal with isolation, marginalization, notions of freedom – they’re essential works that every art lover should see.”

Al Sulaiman has one of the largest collections of female Saudi Arabian art in the world. “What Saudi Arabian women have contributed to feminist art is incredible” she says, “and it’s such an untapped body of work in art history. Because the social climate for these women has been so bad in the past, many of them felt the reputation of a country that had no part in leading has tarnished them. My hope is that people will reconsider the work of these women as completely separate from the state.”

Al Sulaiman believes that the art by women including Al Homoud, Al Dowayan and installation artist Filwah Nazer were crucial in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in changing the cultural view of Saudi women. “People often ask about censorship, but look at Manal’s photos or Filwah Nazer’s Another Body sculptures. The way these artists have tracked the changes in the lives of women in the region, and made their criticisms clear is incredibly important.”

The independent architecture organization Um-Slaim Collective was founded by two female Saudi architects who set up their business with this goal in mind – to distinguish the cultural history of Saudi Arabia as separate from that of the government. Their aim is to “preserve the rich design legacy in the capital city of Saudi Arabia that is as interesting as it is beautiful” co-founder Sara Alissa says. Alissa and Nojoud Alsudairi met through friends at a wedding in Paris, and after discovering they were both architects, decided to set up a practice where they could simultaneously work on their designs whilst striving to preserve the historic 19th Century mud houses of downtown Riyadh, formerly the center of the city.

“Most of the buildings were built in the late 1800s” Alsudairi tells me, “everything from stately homes in Old Diriyah Palace, to cottages for workers and schools. But they’re dissolving, quite literally”. Alsudairi and Alissa are currently strategising ways to preserve the handmade mud and hay walls and the artistic details carved inside which are disintegrating as the years pass. “Many of these houses have the traditional Sadu cornicing, hand carved by workers and incredible examples of one of the most important themes of Saudi visual culture still.” They’re also interested in looking beyond Riyadh to the Al-Qatt Al-Asiri houses in Asir, where in the 1970s women would paint the interior walls of their living rooms.

O’Dowyan and Mahmoud see their work as bearing these key historical markers of the women who came before them and also worked in secrecy, as O’Dowyan originally did at Aramco, “In my art, you can see the change in women’s lives in Saudi arabia in the works, the art works become historical art within years, not just decades.”

One image in particular stands out from O’Dowyan’s first ever photo series shot in Aramco. It’s I Am… A Filmmaker and it depicts a woman with a film director’s clapboard obscuring her face. It is O’Dowyan’s friend, the now critically acclaimed film director Haifaa Al Mansour, who’s 2012 film Wadjda and more recently The Perfect Candidate, explored the tensions between the rapid changes in law in Saudi Arabia for women and the reality of the social attitudes that make implementing these laws difficult. “Haifa and I have been friends for years!” O’Dowyan says, “but no one realized it was her in the photo years before her success. But that’s the power of the counterpublic.”

The Art Library at Misk Art Institute is open now.