Shifting Sands: A Battle Song by Manal AlDowayan

Manal AlDowayan represents Saudi Arabia at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, from 20 April to 24 November 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.

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 desert's sonic and geological features with women's voices, 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.

The National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia presents Manal AlDowayan, Shifting Sands: A Battle Song, 2024, a work in progress. Photo by venicedocumentationproject. Courtesy of the Visual Arts Commission, the Commissioner for the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia.

Manal AlDowayan, Shifting Sands: A Battle Song, 2024. Multimedia installation, Tussar silk, ink, acrylic paint. Dimensions variable. Sound, multichannel, 30’48”. Photography by venicedocumentationproject. Courtesy of the Visual Arts Commission, the Commissioner for the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia

In preparation for her Venice commission, the artist conducted workshops across Saudi Arabia in Al Khobar, Jeddah, and Riyadh, connecting with over 1,000 Saudi women. Through these sessions, AlDowayan offered women and girls a platform to assert their voices - individually and collectively - with regard to how they are portrayed in local and global media. Their self-expression is channelled through the distinctive "singing sands" of the Rub' al-Khali (Empty Quarter) – a vast desert where the towering dunes hum and drone as they shift. AlDowayan has recorded the deep vibrations of the earth to enact the shift at the centre of the work. The "singing sands" act as a metaphor: the sound of minuscule individual grains of sand interacting with one another accumulates into a collective roar.

It is through both sound and sculpture that Shifting Sands: A Battle Song claims the space of the Pavilion. 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. AlDowayan marks the "body" of these outsized blooms with text as with her earlier desert rose sculptures. Here, for the first time, the surface of these sculptures is silkscreened with drawings and writings of workshop participants, or texts about Saudi women, sourced from local and international news media. AlDowayan has trained her focus on the ways Saudi women in particular are discussed, both locally and internationally. Her research has revealed an obsession with their veiling and unveiling, how they may and may not act, and manifold assumptions around their wants and desires, but very little around how Saudi women themselves identify. The words taken from newspaper headlines speak of Saudi women, terms that want to fix and hold their presence, unyielding opinions made fact. Shifting Sands: A Battle Song calls for solidarity, and is an experience designed to inspire courage.

AlDowayan says: "For my presentation at the Biennale Arte 2024, I will attempt to represent where I stand in my practice, positioned in the context of my community, my country, and the world. I intend to 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. My artwork incorporates sound and soft sculpture. The sonic layering includes the sound of the singing dunes of the Empty Quarter and the voices of women and girls singing and harmonizing with the sound of nature. Sound is an invisible instrument that occupies the space. It has a huge presence; you can't see it, but you cannot deny that what you don't see exists. The soft sculpture, made of Tussar silk, is a form I have worked with for many years, the desert rose.

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."

Dina Amin, CEO of the Visual Arts Commission, says: "AlDowayan's work is a profound reflection on the journey undertaken by Saudi women in recent years. Through her commission in Venice, the artist invites audiences to reflect on outdated stereotypes, while at the same time giving voice to Saudi women of today – strong, ambitious, and compassionate. AlDowayan's work empowers Saudi women inviting them to reclaim control of their narrative thus mirroring the changes in Saudi society where women are now able to work in any field, travel independently, and shape their own destiny."

Commenting on their participation, the curators Jessica Cerasi and Maya El Khalil, with Shadin AlBulaihed as the assistant curator, say: "In the context of the Biennale Arte 2024 theme Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, in which the solitude of an outsider is met with the fellowship of shared experience, AlDowayan resists a narrative of "othering" and offers forth voices that have for too long gone unheard. Shifting Sands: A Battle Song brings together womanhood, landscape, and tradition in an immersive work that boldly looks toward the future."

Shifting Sands: A Battle Song is on view until 24 November 2024 at the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia at the Arsenale, Sale d'Armi, Venice, Italy; commissioned by the Visual Arts Commission: saudipavilion.org.