Saudi artist Dania Alsaleh: “We can celebrate our traditions, but we really need to be open to change.”
Dubai: “I call myself a visual artist who focuses on social conditioning and memory.” That’s Saudi artist Dania Al-Saleh’s “elevator pitch.” But like all such useful soundbites, this piece also explores the complexity and complexity of the multi-layered multimedia work that won her several prestigious residencies and awards, including the 2019 Isla Art Prize. Unable to communicate ambition.
Al-Saleh, whose work has had a great influence on many people, took quite some time to convince himself that he was ready to present his work, which at the time was heavily influenced by Islamic geometry, to the world. It took.
“I was interested in art from an early age, but I never really had the opportunity. I went to school and university in Riyadh, where I was born,” Al-Saleh told Arab News. “It wasn’t until I moved to Jeddah that I really became interested in art. I studied for probably five or six years in the studio of the recently deceased Safiya bin Zagul. That’s how I started drawing, I really learned the basics of painting, color theory, and shapes. Then, whenever I had the chance to travel abroad, I took classes in painting and life-size drawings. I fell in love with Islamic geometry, and then… After probably 10 years of studying art, I gained the confidence to actually complete the piece.”
Her first exhibition was a group exhibition in 2012. “No one knew who I was, but a lot of people asked about my work,” she says. In 2013, she joined Athr Gallery’s artist roster. Now, she says, “it was getting serious” and she decided to become a full-time artist. Moved to London in 2014.
“I decided to do a Master of Fine Arts at Goldsmiths. I didn’t get in, but they offered me entry into another program called Computational Arts “It completely changed my practice 180 degrees,” she says. “The program is aimed at artists without a technology background, and we learned how to create installations using physical computing, and how to code things like processing and frameworks. I really fell in love with it. Machine learning resonated with me. We don’t call it AI, we call it machine learning. It’s a more modern way of expressing my practice. I completely changed it to.
“I’m not an AI artist. I’m a visual artist,” she continues. “I have machine learning in my toolbox next to my paints, next to my canvas, next to my videos, next to my audio files, next to my photos. And depending on the situation, I choose the tools I want to use. That’s it.”
As her elevator pitch suggests, that context typically involves exploring memory and our relationship with media.
“I’m interested in social conditioning in everyday life: what we take at face value, what we take for granted,” she says. “Where do these things that we habitually do come from? And I usually look at the media and how it affects us. How it affects our memories, what stays and what gets erased. And how we reprogram our memories, sometimes just by looking at content on social media. So that’s really what interests me.”
Here, Alzare talks about some of her most important works.
“compensation”
This is an example of my old work. This is a work from 2017. You can see this perfectly organized structure, five hand-painted panels of Islamic patterns, all with random brushstrokes. That’s my intervention. This explains how obsessed we are with celebrating our traditions and customs. We can celebrate and appreciate our history and traditions, but we also need to be open to change and embrace new things and new ideas.
“Sotum”
This artwork, this audiovisual installation, was a big change for me. It was a huge leap forward from my drawings. This work was created during my master’s degree and won the Isla Art Prize in 2019. It deals with forms of expression. The visuals were inspired by German new media artist Manfred Moll, who created similar images based on algorithms in the 60s, which move and vibrate whenever a sound is played. There were sounds coming from all the screens, the pronunciation of Arabic letters, but when you put them all together in one space, it’s like a cacophony of noise. This is an explanation of how communication sometimes breaks down and sometimes works. It has many meanings and is very layered, but fundamentally it is about communication and forms of expression.
“What remains”
This is a large-scale installation that I created for the first Diriyah Biennale. Again, this is about memory. collective memory and individual memory. Collective memory is where we remember things through monuments and celebrations, such as National Day. That’s where our collective memory lies. However, much is lost in an individual’s memory, especially when there is a lot of development and change. So this is a very gentle commentary on what we are currently witnessing and experiencing in Saudi Arabia. The individual memories of the characters on the cylinder, the buildings, houses and structures that are being developed and changed.
The faces of the cylinder are generated mechanically. They are deepfakes. I collected my own face dataset and trained a machine to create new faces. I then took those new faces and transferred them to the cylinder. The painting is turned inside out, so when you shine a light on the cylinder, you can see the shadows of these faces. And people who come there say things like, “Oh, this person looks like my aunt, this person looks like my uncle.” It has a Saudi/Gulf aesthetic and may be similar as the machine learns what you focus on. So if my dataset focuses on a particular aesthetic, that’s what will be created. But these people never existed.
“Evanes”
This is actually based on a degree ceremony at a university. I have two identities. Western identity and Gulf identity. And whenever I’m in the West, the news is very different than what I see in the Middle East. Similarly, since the Iraq War, all the images you see of Iraq are destruction, war, poverty, madness, explosions, and guns. But what I know about Iraq is its culture and art, literature and science. So for my degree presentation, I collected all the images of Iraq from the 40s, 50s, and 60s for a machine learning program and created new images that had the aesthetic of old photographs. But they are all deepfakes. And “Evanesce” is a continuation of this research, but with a focus on the golden age of Egyptian cinema. I watched a lot of Egyptian movies and collected 15 tropes that are repeated in most of them. A gorgeous staircase, a car, an old classic telephone answering, a belly dancer, a family gathering over breakfast, the chaos of the morning, the protagonist and his friends, an embrace and romance, a close-up of a palm tree and a particular building. We created datasets based on each metaphor and trained each dataset with a machine learning program. So we took 15 machine learning outputs based on these metaphors and stitched them together to create this 10-minute film. And this morphing from one image to another that you see in videos is exactly like how we remember things. Again, this is an explanation of social conditioning. These films are very popular and very important in the MENA region, which is a conservative society, but the images on screen truly contradicted their culture and values. So this is a commentary on how we as a society view these things that truly contradict our belief systems and traditions. But there’s a kind of… obsession. These movie stars and these movies were an obsession for many people in conservative countries. It is etched into our collective memory and continues to resonate to this day. These films spread to many conservative regions, from North Africa to the Middle East. Therefore, there are many tensions and contradictions between these two worlds.
“Hinato”
This is an important work to me. This work was created during my stay in AlUla in 2022. This work is modeled after this Nabataean woman, Hinat, whose tomb is in (Hegra). That was very exciting for me. Obviously, she came from a very prominent family. Because she was wealthy enough to have her own tomb, and that was her name. The installation consists of a collage of different views of AlUla, each canvas cut into a rectangle and a video projected into the rectangle. These videos are inspired by Hinat, imagining her future generations from her lineage living in AlUla and roaming these landscapes. And the video was created by machine learning. We hired three women from AlUla. We went to different places and had them wear different colorful fabrics. We shot videos, created a dataset from each video, and trained the program. The result was a very ghostly abstract shape that moved through the landscape.
“Electronic proxy”
This was part of my solo exhibition in 2023. This is a video where a face transforms into an emoji and then back into a face. This is an explanation of the popularity of emojis and how to express yourself with emojis and emoticons. That’s interesting and important to me. Our different emotions cannot be expressed in 10 or 20 smileys. It’s very limiting. So what’s going on there? I’m not giving answers, but I’m leaving room for you to ask yourself questions. And listen, I’m a huge supporter of emojis. Emojis help save time. But I’m asking what’s going on here. Does it condition us to be less expressive? Or have we conditioned it as a tool to express ourselves? There is this duality. In other words, there is no correct perspective. It’s very subjective. But it’s always worth asking these questions.
“The Gathering”
This was the result of another residency I conducted with French-Swiss artist Catherine Gfeller, supported by the French Embassy in Saudi Arabia. We wanted to find out who the women (not necessarily Saudis) are living in Riyadh, which is experiencing an explosion of art, culture, and infrastructure. I was born and raised in Riyadh and currently live in Jeddah, but I know Riyadh well and have seen it change. And I’m just in awe and disbelief at what I’m seeing. To make a long story short, we put out an open call and 37 women participated from 11 countries, from different backgrounds, different generations, and different professions. We interviewed them and videotaped the interviews. My focus was on the emotional side of things: how to deal with loneliness in a big city. What does love mean to you? What about resentment? What about forgiveness? The interview audio then fades in and out. We put everything together as if women were getting together and sharing their thoughts and feelings. And the videos were all manipulated by AI as well. It is a multi-layered effect and refers to different aspects of the emotions we experience.
“36”
This was part of the same project as “The Gathering”. This is a composite of the faces of all the women who participated, except for one woman who refused to remove her niqab, so she could not be included in this image. I don’t think this is a new idea – I think it’s been done many times before – but what I wanted was… what is Saudi Arabia, what is Riyadh, and It was about confronting this perception of who these women are out there…and really expounding on it. , a multicultural city with diverse backgrounds. And even when you look at this image, you don’t know where that “person” is from or what their ethnic background is. When you look at that image, you can think about many things.
