Contemporary Art as the Gateway to Saudi Arabia: Artist Talk by Manal Al-Dowayan
Monumental sculptures hold the power to mould our spatial interaction and define how residents interact with public spaces in cities. Their scale, monumentality and design can be adopted to showcase how the city and its citizens want to be seen and how they utilise public spaces to reflect social, cultural and political change.
At an Artist Talk held at the Henry Moore Foundation Studios & Gardens in September, Manal Al-Dowayan elucidated on the power of monumental sculptures to blend within the cityscape of Jeddah. Focusing primarily on Henry Moore's sculptures in the city, Manal Al-Dowayan, a prolific contemporary artist and curator of the Saudi Arabian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, delved into the inception, installation and perception of Moore's sculptures in Jeddah. Al-Dowayan's extensive research led her from the 1970s and 1980s oil boom in Saudi Arabia to the current contemporary art boom in the country.
Whilst Saudi Arabia underwent rapid economic change during the 1970s oil boom, it came hand in hand with changing urban development. Jeddah, a gateway into the Arabian Peninsula, became the first port of entry for new visitors and an economic hub of trade and commerce. Mohamed Said Al-Farsi, the mayor of Jeddah who himself had a background in urban planning, embarked on a campaign to beautify the city through a synthesis of art and urban development.
Conducting interviews with Al-Farsi's family, Al-Dowayan elucidated how Al-Farsi partnered with Spanish architect Julio Lafuente to plan a scheme of dotting Jeddah's urban landscape with 400 public artworks. Al-Farsi reached out to a plethora of contemporary artists, which included Jean Miró, Victor Vasarely, Alexander Calder, and Henry Moore among many others.
Working with the extensive archives of Henry Moore, Al-Dowayan learned that while the artist was unable to visit Jeddah due to a backlog of artworks, he was invited to create three artworks for the city for approximately $675,000. Perhaps aided by Moore's lack of tactile familiarity with Jeddah's landscape, his first two works lacked the scale and monumentality required to stand out in the changing urban infrastructure of the city. As a result, his third artwork, a totem, was much taller.
Moore and his fellow artists' artworks heralded a new age of contemporary art being exhibited within the landscape of a major Saudi city. These sculptures not only had a visual purpose but created a sensory and memory experience for the citizens, who readily accepted these artworks placed. Jeddah, "the bride of the Red Sea", became adorned with sculptures in spaces of community engagement, such as roundabouts, parks, and coastal areas to name a few. These sculptures were integrated into daily life and became accessible public spaces.
A similar phenomenon can be seen today. As Saudi Arabia undergoes a new phase of urban and economic development, Al-Dowayan emphasised art remains at the centre of it and grapples with the same ideological synthesis as in 1970s Jeddah. Contemporary art exists in the complex interplay of modernisation, religion, and tradition, each with a significant role in the socioeconomic fabric of the country.
Al-Dowayan's own recent sculptural installation, titled Now You See Me, Now You Don't, in the AlUla desert sits at the intersection of enhancing the physical arid environment but remains invisible unless activated by a visitor. The artwork spotlights the beauty and untouched traditions of the region but in contact with modern materials, it becomes a much more interactive space for engagement.
The contemporary sculptures of Jeddah, according to Al-Dowayan, exist for the people of the city. They not only stand to beautify the cityscape but create memory experiences within the city's psyche and its public perception. As someone who had interacted with these artworks from the perspective of a citizen going about her day, Al-Dowayan came to the Henry Moore Foundation to understand another part of the sculptures historicity: the process of conceiving them, building them, and thought about by an artist who had never travelled to Jeddah.
After a community-based restoration initiative, these sculptures now stand in the Jeddah Sculpture Museum, heralding a new phase of their existence. Now, the sculptures are not commemorated for their newness value or their communal function. Rather, their value is derived from their intrinsic visual quality and their historical value in the city of Jeddah.
A focus on preserving the contemporary art of Jeddah portends to the increased emphasis on fostering art by leaders and art professionals in the midst of a new wave of globalisation in the country. Sotheby's exhibition titled Hafla: A Celebration of Middle Eastern Art, highlighted emerging and established artists from Saudi Arabia, while Christie's announced the expansion of their Middle East operations in Saudi Arabia. As Al-Dowayan posits, with increased attention to the contemporary art of Saudi Arabia, people will continue to seek ways to strike a balance between the religious history of the country, the traditions of its diverse population, and the continuous efforts to modernise and globalise the landscape, the urbanity and its people. Simultaneously, as witnessed in 1970s Jeddah, contemporary art can continue to create a bridge between these social aspects and become an avenue to create new forms of social interactions.