- Title
- Courage
- Date Made
- 2013
- Medium
- Archival photo paper mounted on dibond with plexiglas lettering
- Dimensions
- a-n: 30 7/8 × 3 1/2 × 5 in. (78.42 × 8.89 × 12.7 cm) each
a-n) Installation: 30 7/8 × 49 × 5 in. (78.42 × 124.46 × 12.7 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2013.105a-n
- Collecting Area
- Art of the Middle East: Contemporary
- Curatorial Notes
Culled from a newspaper clipping, this disassembled image depicts fully veiled women, clothed in the
traditional black abaya, engaged in study. Each section of the photograph is inscribed with an archaic
Arabic word, all synonyms for "courage" and appropriated from a tenth-century text by Abu Mansour
Al-Tha’alby Al-Naysaboury. Rendered in black plexiglass, the three-dimensional, anachronistic words
create a tension and contradiction between these stereotypical representations of today’s Saudi women
and their underlying humanity.
Manal Al Dowayan is one of the best known among the new generation of Saudi artists; she works mainly
in the medium of photography. Her series The State of Disappearance, to which the print Courage
belongs, is the artist’s personal investigation into the portrayal of Saudi women in print media, especially
newspapers. The series is a commentary on the seeming invisibility of a large sector of Saudi women,
who are customarily shrouded in black when in public.
- Selected Bibliography
Komaroff, Linda. "Islamic Art Now and Then." In Islamic Art: Past, Present, Future, edited by Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, 26-56. New Haven, New York, and London: Yale University Press, 2019.
