Manal Al Dowayan

Manal Al Dowayan was born in 1973 in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and divides her time between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Her educational path is unusually wide-ranging: she holds a degree in Computer Information Systems from Suffolk University (1999), a further qualification in Systems Analysis and Design from London Metropolitan University (2003), and an MA in Contemporary Art Practice in Public Spheres from the Royal College of Art, London (2018). This arc — from technical disciplines toward art practice rooted in public engagement — is legible throughout her work, which consistently draws on collective participation, personal and communal memory, and the social dimensions of space.

Al Dowayan works across photography, installation, and monumental public sculpture. Suspended Together (2011), an early installation associated with the Barjeel Art Foundation, established her interest in women's experience and collective social space. Tree of Guardians (2014), first shown in unfinished form at 21,39 in Jeddah, deepened her participatory approach, centering women's voices and testimony within expansive sculptural form. The following year, a residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida, catalyzed And I, Will I Forget? (2015), a work drawing on photographic images, personal archives, and the textures of memory and loss — a pivotal turn toward intimate remembrance within her practice. Now You See Me, Now You Don't (2020), a permanent outdoor installation in AlUla, Saudi Arabia, marked her confident move into desert-scale public sculpture. Her most ambitious work to date, Shifting Sands: A Battle Song (2024), is a participatory multimedia installation incorporating sound, sculpture, and the recorded voices of approximately 1,000 Saudi women; it was presented as the Saudi Arabia Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, placing collective female authorship at the center of one of the art world's most prominent international stages.

Her exhibition record spans institutions across multiple continents, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the British Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Institut du monde arabe in Paris, and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, among many others. Solo presentations have been held at Athr Gallery in Jeddah, Sabrina Amrani Gallery in Madrid — her primary gallery — Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde in Dubai, and Cuadro Art Gallery in Dubai. Her work enters permanent collections at the British Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Mathaf, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Residencies at the Delfina Foundation in London (2009) and NYU Abu Dhabi (2014) preceded her RCA studies, and a collaboration with choreographer Akram Khan, Thikra: Night of Remembering, is currently touring through 2027. In 2023, she received the Visual Arts Award from the Ministry of Culture, Saudi Arabia.