[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"]
[/caption]Women of Saudi Arabia Emerge on the Bosporus
By SUSANNE FOWLER
ISTANBUL — A quiet evolution is taking place here inside a vast warehouse near the Bosporus and at an inland convention center where rarely seen Saudi Arabian art — including some with feminist themes — is on display.
In the warehouse known as Sanat Limani, or Art Port, the creative movement based in London and Jidda called Edge of Arabia has organized “Transition,” a collection of works from 22 Saudi artists that touch on issues of faith, culture and identity. On display through Dec. 26, “Transition” coincides with Contemporary Istanbul, an international art exposition that runs through Sunday.
At Art Port, across a parking lot from the Istanbul Modern, the photographer Manal al-Dowayan documents real Saudi women in their real jobs, from computer scientist, to doctor, to teacher, to petroleum engineer. In her “I Am” series, the engineer wears a hard hat and a uniform with a “safety first” label on her chest, but Ms. Dowayan has added a face veil heavily decorated with beads and coins.
“A lot of people don’t like that one,” said Ms. Dowayan, 37. “They say, for example, that the place where she works doesn’t require a veil and she is allowed to work as a petro-engineer fully.
“But I put it there because it looks so awkward. The feeling you get when you look at the image is the point I want to make. It doesn’t match. It doesn’t look right. Restrictions are awkward, especially when they don’t make sense.”
Ms. Dowayan, who was born and raised in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia and works full time as an artist, addresses still other restrictions in her ongoing project, “The Choice.”
Those photos include pictures of women in activities they are not allowed to pursue — driving, athletics, voting — “different things that I think have been taken over, choices that women should make themselves, like whether to drive or not, whether to vote or not: Choices that have been taken away.”
“Movement,” she continued, “is a very big issue for Saudi women, the idea of transportation and moving from Point A to Point B. So I explore the idea of driving because women are not allowed to drive in Saudi. Other images address women’s sports in schools, which are not allowed. This is not something I am bringing up for the first time: this is a dialogue that exists within the community, in the media, in the elite class, in the lower class. But I portray the contemporary scene within the general discussion in Saudi Arabia.”
She is striking a theme that is common in Muslim countries. “There’s this whole dialogue about whether the rules are based on religion or tradition,” she said. “It’s a thin line that’s hard to find.
“I add jewelry to their work portraits as a link to tradition,” she explained. “Yes, the jewelry is beautiful, and tradition is beautiful, but when it’s imposed in the wrong place, it becomes strange and awkward and might cause a negative reaction.”
Another artist in the “Transition” exhibition, Hala Ali, is also showing a piece at Contemporary Istanbul. Organizers of the fair at the Istanbul Lutfi Kirdar Convention & Exhibition Center in the Harbiye neighborhood say that art valued at €25 million, or $34 million, from 14 countries is on display.
Aya Mousawi, the assistant curator of the “Transition” show, which is part of Istanbul’s European Capital of Culture celebration, explained the crossover: “Contemporary Istanbul is a young art fair and it’s attracting a lot of people from the Gulf, the international world. We want to support our artists and help them showcase themselves on these types of platforms. Because we’ve got our main exhibit in Istanbul, it only makes sense that we also have a collaboration with the country’s leading art fair.”
Ms. Ali’s work, “The Girl’s Room,” is one such collaboration. One wall of the installation is covered with text that Ms. Ali described as having “an overtly feminist tone” creating “a kind of feminist manifesto: It’s humorous sometimes, facetious sometimes, kind of ironic.”
When an automated blacklight comes on, all the masculine words within the text pop out in fluorescent colors, she said, as a commentary on “subtext and underlying meanings not visible to naked eye.”
Audiences sometimes interpret the piece as a political statement on the oppression of women, she said: “This is probably the third or fourth time I’ve executed this piece. Many people think it’s some kind of criticism of a patriarchal system, but actually the only system I’m criticizing is language. Structurally speaking, words are extremely loaded. And the way language functions is not as black and white as it may seem.”
That her work is being displayed in two venues in Istanbul is an accomplishment for the 24-year-old artist. Born in Saudi Arabia, Ms. Ali grew up in London and moved to Dubai with her family when she was 15. She abandoned her studies of applied linguistics and was just months away from finishing a fine arts degree at the University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates.
Saudi art, she conceded, is not well known globally.
“And I have to take responsibility for the fact that I was basically ignorant of Saudi art. I never saw it, never understood it,” she said. “It’s not as mainstream as people like to think and it’s not a completely booming society, but it does exist.
“This is only my second international show. The first was in Berlin, and yes, there was a bit of a surprise factor,” she said. “A lot of people thought I was commenting on issues in Saudi, which I wasn’t, but I understood where that inference came from. I had to correct a few people: I am not talking about internal Saudi policy here.”
Ms. Ali’s other piece, showing at Art Port, is a video commentary on Turkish-Arab relations and the power of media and language to soothe over dislike and suspicion. In it, she shows the final episode of the Turkish television soap opera “Gumus” that drew 80 million viewers after being dubbed in colloquial Arabic.
Ms. Dowayan, the photographer, sees an even wider potential audience for Saudi art.
“Right now there’s a renaissance of a sort,” she said. “People are really curious about Saudi Arabia and as always, art is a window to the soul of a community. When you can view a collective of 20 contemporary artists from Saudi, you get a little window into what’s going on there.
“People are very surprised. The reaction you get: Really, is that how it is? But people really embrace the colors in these works, or how forward some of the statements are, and how delicate are others.
“Saudi is getting closer and closer to Turkish culture through television, the soap operas,” Ms. Dowayan said. “So you have so many Saudis very interested in Turkish culture because suddenly they realize, ‘Oh they’re just like us.’
“They’re not, but they are,” she added. “I love how art and media and things are working to bring two different cultures even closer. A few years ago there wasn’t any link. The only barrier is the language and sooner or later, that barrier will fall, too.”
This article is from: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/25/arts/25iht-M25CART.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
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