What Is And What Has Been

Sabrina Amrani is pleased to present What Is And What Has Been, an exhibition of works by Manal AlDowayan that covers more than a decade of her practice, from 2005 to 2016.

The show brings together works from the series "The Choice", the very first works of AlDowayan in silver gelatins, that are the reflection of a continuous dialogue that affects the lives of millions of Arab women and that discusses the restrictions imposed on them due to the local traditions that have become intertwined with religion and identity.

From the same initial period in the artist's work, the exhibition continues with a piece from the series "I Am", perhaps the series of most recognizable and recognized works of AlDowayan, also made in silver gelatins. In this series, the artist explores a gender story that does not physically exist - yet - because it was discontinued, fractured or forgotten.

With the works of "Landscapes of the Mind" in the exhibition the artist plays with the landscape genre, using representations of Saudi Arabia as a means of expression in an exchange of thought between the mind and nature, the self and the other.

The show also includes works from the series "Crash" that explores the phenomenon of teachers from Saudi Arabia appointed to work in remote villages across the country and who are losing their lives in traffic accidents.

Finally, works from the series "And I, Will I Forget?" are presented, where the artist reinvented a whole narrative from a box of slides that her father with Alzheimer gave her in her adolescence and that documents a period of the father's life that could never be told by the protagonist.

This exhibition is a narration of the context of the exhibition Watch Before You Fall in the new space of Sabrina Amrani in Madrid and shows us the evolution in the artist's career, in its themes and aesthetics.