Saudi Arabia: a place where it is very much equally difficult for art or women to thrive, to disturb the status quo or to openly show too much of themselves in public.
Two Saudi artists (and more) are challenging people to make art respectable again after a long dark age while also confronting social evils and inequalities. It’s a Herculean task, but they feel up to it.
Abdulnasser Gharem lives in two different worlds – or maybe three or four. A Saudi army colonel for years, he has become the leading and best-known living artist in Saudi Arabia. Lest the cynical wonder if there are any other artists: there are many, but they’ve had to lie low and be something else, or work small and furtively.
Gharem’s work holds its own against Western artists with far more opportunities, although he travels and shows internationally at this point. Using mediums of concept art, installation art, sculpture and painting, his work is uniquely tailored to his people and time.
Gharem (42) is attempting to lead artistically-inclined Saudi youth through the same discovery of art that he did secretly and on his own. Without a chance to attend a real art school and seeing little in real life, Gharem dreamed of making art when he was young. But the entire society was resistant, including his family. “They … had never seen a museum, or any example of Saudi artist that they could look at and say, oh yeah, I want my son to be like that,” he says.
The internet rocked Gharem’s world, as well as others desperate for information and images of the wider world without censorship. In an interview with Anna Somers Cocks, he describes their glee. “When it arrived we were like crazy, sitting in front of the monitor for eight hours just to see what a museum is, an art fair, who’s Marcel Duchamp, who’s Picasso, who’s Rembrandt.”
Little wired boxes also allowed them to check out science and other religions, all prohibited or closely censored. Gharem assumes that just as the World Wars changed European thinking, the Gulf Wars and Arab Spring will “change everything,” including art. He is still optimistic that it will be for the better.
In 2003 Gharem briefly studied in arts village Abha and almost immediately staged a group exhibition which “challenged existing modes of art practice in Saudi Arabia.” Only a decade later, more than 26 young modern artists, collectives and foundations from Saudi Arabia openly operated.
Like other Saudis, Gharem is cautiously political in his work, but manages to make statements that support liberty without calling for revolution. He’s concerned that ISIS is luring youth into jihad through propaganda and social media, so they can play out “Grand Theft Auto” by blowing up real people and places. This spurred him to offer alternatives in art workshops – something better than violence and death. “We must fight this ideology with educational activities,” he said, and he has high hopes for art as well.
Perhaps because of Gharem’s military service where Saudis cooperated with the U.S. in the Gulf Wars, America is seriously watched and weighed. His “Capitol Dome” installed in London in 2012 doesn’t appear hostile when put in context of other work and statements. A beautifully-made, scaled-down model of the U.S. capitol dome is lined with a mosque inside and carefully balanced on edge – it’s enough to raise blood pressure in a nation deluged by Islam vs. everything.
But Gharem claims this is symbolic of the precarious future of democracy in the post-Arab Spring world. For the Washington Post, the artist explains: “In the same way, many Saudis are drawn to democracy but we don’t know what is inside. Perhaps it is like a mosque? Perhaps something else.”
Other allusions to the U.S. and hopes for freedom reveal themselves in the form of rows of raised rubber stamped messages. Gharem used thousands of them in Arabic and Latin alphabet as a “canvas.” Over these he paints martial objects surrounding by strangely elegant and beautiful bursts of tile-like tessellations. It’s an odd juxtaposition.
One of these, “In Transit I-II,” features a military jet hosting at least one quote from George W Bush. In tiny block letters viewers find this message from the former President in 2004:
If America shows weakness and uncertainty
the world will drift toward tragedy.
that will not happen on my watch.
The grand peacock-fan jet stands for the Saudi Arabian involvement in 9/11 and refers delicately to the bonds of trust that it strains. “In Transit” refers to Gharem’s earlier work, “The Path” (Al Siraat). It’s a mission to “restore behaviour to a higher standard remembered from the past,” using new technologies and insights.
Part of a larger series called “Restored Behaviour,” it’s a phrase artists from other cultures may use and be considered progressive – but don’t try this at home. Americans attempting it would be classified retrograde troglodytes on a Sunday school mission from God.
Another reference to democracy, tiny blocks of script deep within his “Camouflage III” (2014) reads “No system of government can or should be imposed by any other.” The enormous center piece which contain this shares walls with an ironically framed seal “In accordance with Shariah Law.”
Every piece is deliberated and intentional in message or spirit. In “Tank” (2010), the words “the new world order” appears (although hidden and reversed among thousands of Arabic script) in raised rubber stamps. A tiny morphed Obama also appears unexplained in “No More Tears.” Printed across him is “No, or bad signal.”
Gharem’s dreams are vast. He wants to “change everything” – artists and the people. “They will see the artist as negotiating their issues … and be involved, they will not just come to watch,” he predicts.
So far Gharem has avoided problems with authorities, possibly because of his military background. He seems a peacemaker, as embodied in the mission of his “Amen [art] Foundation.”
“The good thing about the word ‘amen’ is that you find it in Islam, in Judaism, in Christianity,” he explains. “Lately, the king has been trying to encourage that kind of dialogue between religions, so I thought, if the king wants this dialogue, I will try to handle the cultural or artistic side of this mission of my country.”
Manal Al Dowayan is a brave woman making art in a nation where women are expected to be remain silent and unseen.
“And my voice must be hushed so as not to offend. So what will remain of me?” she asked in one of her recent exhibits.
Not unexpectedly, Manal is not nearly as acclaimed and lauded for her efforts as Gharem. She doesn’t have blessings of the king nor the resources and rights to travel as much as the average man. (However one of the Saudi princesses recently helped to stage a women’s group show.)
Manal is an activist and researcher for women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, and uses her art as a form of “protest” in attempts to move people to empathize with their plight – to the point of changing.
Jaded Westerners may be fed up to here with “women’s issues” which seem trite and irrelevant most of the time from sheer overuse. We also swim in all the rights they dream of – but in Saudi Arabia, it’s a dangerous and edgy activity to be a “feminist.”
Raised on an Aram Company compound, Manal was in shock once the walls were removed and she had to deal with the real Saudi Arabia. She saw the passivity of women and lack of choice at every level – the narrow confines of their marital and other family chores and duties. Her art exposes that and attempts to pierce the veil women are hidden behind in every way.
Manal is known as having a “strong voice.” It’s rare for a woman who can end up imprisoned or worse by their words alone, in this Islamic stronghold. She is a strong character who is pushing against her nation’s stringent, religiously-inspired traditions. Still, she is more openly vocal in her disapproval against the tight strictures and limitations of expression and choice than most.
Even so Manal has done well for herself. She participated in residencies across the world and has been inducted into various cultural leadership initiatives and speaking engagements. Manal is heavily and internationally shown and collected. Strikingly, Manal claims she experienced little censorship or negative reaction back home, in spite of her criticisms.
The artist’s 2014 exhibit “Crash” is a research-based revelation of the “the disturbing number of car accidents in Saudi Arabia in which female teachers are injured or killed.”
These “accidents” are not merely random. A combination of social, political and religious factors are responsible for their deaths. Poorly paid, banned from driving, bad roads, assignments far from home and being forced to hire any man who will take them in groups – these are all indicted.
But Saudi women are treated like dirt after death as well as in life. Although deaths and injuries of teachers are reported in Saudi newspapers, tradition requires their names are never mentioned and their faces remain unseen. They are merely abstractions, hardly human. They could be metaphors for the entirely of women’s abuse in strict Islamic culture.
Manal mourns these women in her show. “My name is being erased because of the shame of pronouncing it publicly.”
Her “art” is a graphic presentation of mangled car photographs and traffic reports, newspaper clippings and research on statistics. Manal juxtaposes this with the real lives of the mass of lost teachers. Tweets, emails and phone conversations made prior to the accidents, substantiate and flesh-out the real life women. In a sense, she’s pasting them back together. Her own notes are like a forensic detective at a crime scene, with technical details.
Part of the exhibit/protest includes maps with data points marking their homes and the long distances they must travel, as well as other risks. Teaching in Saudi Arabia apparently requires a daily gauntlet course, at least for women. Maps were commissioned by Saudi government “expert engineers” who must be well aware of these tragic occurrences.
Manal asks in her exhibit, “How do you mourn if the suffering have no face or name?”
Another exhibit of hers, “Esmi” (My Name) deals with the issue as well. Manal asked women to write their names on wooden balls and suspended them from the ceiling. In Saudi Arabia this is a defiant act. It breaks a common taboo where men rarely even speak the name of women in their lives aloud or in public.
“Each photograph I take is like a part of my soul, and I’d like that to outlive me,” Manal explained. Ironically with the proscriptions against images, portraits and extremity of Islamic “modesty” (only for females), even this exhibit contains no or few faces of the lost. That is a situation Manal and all decent people of the world would like to see changed.
SOURCES:
- Financial Times
- Gareth Harris
- Corrine Martin (various publications)
- Edge of Arabia brochure
- The Art Newspaper
- Greenbox Museum
