Manal AlDowayan is delighted to invite visitors to participate in a site-specific installation at the Guggenheim Museum in New York on May 22 at 6 pm.
A landscape of totems and scrolls with printed images and texts in them, will be displayed in the museum’s rotunda. The imaginary presented in the installation consists of excerpts from Guggenheim’s archives, literature, and everyday press and advertising. These excerpts illustrate narratives that have for generations upheld structures oppressing women and girls. Attendees will be invited to walk around the installation, examine and reflect on the texts and images, and finally, in a collective action, destroy the scrolls. The physical destruction of the scrolls and their messages is a gesture of protest against a history of control, a communal performance that reinforces women’s agency.