Manal AlDowayan | The State of Disappearance > Which opened yesterday @CuadroArt #Dubai

“We must also bear in mind that remembering itself can be a form of forgetting, and collecting a form of discarding, just as in Plato’s view writing, as an instrument of memory, encouraged oblivion.”*

Manal AlDowayan’s exploration of disappearance led her to its counterbalance – the necessary act of conservation. She explores the preservation of definitions through both language and images, relying on two sources, Abu Mansour AlTha’alby AlNaysaboury’s “Jurisprudence of a Language: The Secrets of Arabic,” and daily newspapers from Saudi Arabia.

The complexity of the Arabic language is often lauded for its multitude of nuanced definitions. AlNaysaboury’s book, written in the late 10th century during the Abassid era, stands unique as a detailed categorization of thousands of Arabic words. Unlike a dictionary or thesaurus, AlNaysaboury’s text relies on descriptive categories, such as “Unheard Sounds,” or “The Degrees of a Woman’s Beauty.” This method of documentation through categorization deepens understanding, yet suppresses those definitions that do not fit under the author’s pre-determined labels, relegating them to oblivion. “The Arabic language is a living being,” the scholar Jurji Zaidan described in his book of the same title, concluding that, “once a word is neglected…it can disappear. 

AlDowayan extends Zaidan’s idea of the imperative need for repetition to ensure propagation, to the media’s repeated depictions of the Saudi woman. She appropriates newspaper images of women fully covered in black - duplicated, recognizable images which recur daily regardless of the women about whom the articles are being written, or the subject matter of those articles. The depictions are often far from reality and fortify gender stereotypes by creating new archetypal images that ultimately alter the perception of women and girls.

The creation of groupings and standardized imagery implies a sense of preservation, yet this version of history, far from being objective, is specific to the documenter’s selection, fuelling what Nietzsche termed “active forgetting” and ironically relegating some characteristics into the realm of disappearance. Manal AlDowayan questions her own archival practice, asking, “In my fervor to document my present, am I contributing to a failed formula?”