(Solo Show) The Eternal Return of the Same: Cromwell Place - London
Past exhibition
Works
Overview
"The artworks in the exhibition not only deepen AlDowayan’s nuanced interrogation of women’s shifting status within a metamorphosing Saudi society, but also intensifies her exploration of new material. A nod to Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence,
the title The Eternal Return of the Same captures gestures of repetition and iteration undergirding the works. While the exhibition may provide a moment of reflection on the need for reckoning, it also bears AlDowayan’s hallmark critical assessment of a world rife with
inequity and uncertainty.
AlDowayan slyly employs materials that almost contradict the object depicted. The Emerging (2021) is a series of thirty jesmonite casts. Unevenly textured, pocked with finger marks and smoothed over by hand, the cluster of distinct floor-bound appendages of body parts
question how women are renegotiating their bodies and the spaces they inhabit. As they are increasingly joining the Saudi public sphere, away from the ‘counterpublic,’ exclusively female enclaves of empowerment, women are forced to (re)claim a stake in the patriarchal
arena. More than an innocent celebration of ‘our time has come’, the repeated single, imperfectly cast bodily eruptions in The Emerging suggest that the movement from one space to another, while forceful, is still tenuous: women in the Kingdom must reprocess not only positions, but their bodies and voices within them.
The leg recurs in The Recline (2020), a large tapestry in which the limb morphs and mirrors itself, conjuring a reclining female form, poised above a cascade of loose, unravelled (or not yet woven) linen threads. The work exemplifies not only the notion of repetition—the leg emerging over and over in diverse media—but also the artist’s challenge to the traditional craft of weaving. The Recline, like the other works in the exhibition, exudes at once a political vitality and a sensual poetics of materiality. Just as The Emerging frames an exuberant individuality against a crushing societal sameness, O Sister (2021) confronts the blanket
‘instruction manual’ mentality of religious injunctions with an individualist feminine energy. Modelled on the desert rose—hardened, petal-like crystalline formations occurring in deserts where sand meets salt—O Sister spreads its soft, collapsible, darkly burnished flaps in an ironic embrace. The form evokes some oversized bodily cavity, all multi-layered biological complexity and beckoning openness. Resistant yet refined, the natural silk of the sculpture is printed with instructions penned by religious men determining women’s ‘use’ of their bodies. The inky texts blur on the ridged fabric surface, their legibility confounded by strokes of charcoal. Part of a generation deeply impacted by conservative laws against women in Saudi Arabia, AlDowayan teases out a new tension in O Sister, raising questions about physical emancipation at the very moment the Kingdom ostensibly moves towards greater social freedoms."
the title The Eternal Return of the Same captures gestures of repetition and iteration undergirding the works. While the exhibition may provide a moment of reflection on the need for reckoning, it also bears AlDowayan’s hallmark critical assessment of a world rife with
inequity and uncertainty.
AlDowayan slyly employs materials that almost contradict the object depicted. The Emerging (2021) is a series of thirty jesmonite casts. Unevenly textured, pocked with finger marks and smoothed over by hand, the cluster of distinct floor-bound appendages of body parts
question how women are renegotiating their bodies and the spaces they inhabit. As they are increasingly joining the Saudi public sphere, away from the ‘counterpublic,’ exclusively female enclaves of empowerment, women are forced to (re)claim a stake in the patriarchal
arena. More than an innocent celebration of ‘our time has come’, the repeated single, imperfectly cast bodily eruptions in The Emerging suggest that the movement from one space to another, while forceful, is still tenuous: women in the Kingdom must reprocess not only positions, but their bodies and voices within them.
The leg recurs in The Recline (2020), a large tapestry in which the limb morphs and mirrors itself, conjuring a reclining female form, poised above a cascade of loose, unravelled (or not yet woven) linen threads. The work exemplifies not only the notion of repetition—the leg emerging over and over in diverse media—but also the artist’s challenge to the traditional craft of weaving. The Recline, like the other works in the exhibition, exudes at once a political vitality and a sensual poetics of materiality. Just as The Emerging frames an exuberant individuality against a crushing societal sameness, O Sister (2021) confronts the blanket
‘instruction manual’ mentality of religious injunctions with an individualist feminine energy. Modelled on the desert rose—hardened, petal-like crystalline formations occurring in deserts where sand meets salt—O Sister spreads its soft, collapsible, darkly burnished flaps in an ironic embrace. The form evokes some oversized bodily cavity, all multi-layered biological complexity and beckoning openness. Resistant yet refined, the natural silk of the sculpture is printed with instructions penned by religious men determining women’s ‘use’ of their bodies. The inky texts blur on the ridged fabric surface, their legibility confounded by strokes of charcoal. Part of a generation deeply impacted by conservative laws against women in Saudi Arabia, AlDowayan teases out a new tension in O Sister, raising questions about physical emancipation at the very moment the Kingdom ostensibly moves towards greater social freedoms."
Artworks included: