The Necklace of Hinat Daughter of Wahbu

2026
  • The Necklace of Hinat Daughter of Wahbu, 2026, Unique Piece. Materials : Glass, sand, rope.

  • The Necklace of Hinat Daughter of Wahbu by Manal AlDowayan draws inspiration from a recent archaeological discovery in AlUla, Saudi Arabia: the 2,000-year-old tomb of a Nabataean woman named Hinat. Among her remains, archaeologists uncovered a necklace made not of gold or gemstones, but of date seeds.

     

    This unexpected material shifts conventional notions of value, suggesting that what is precious lies not in rarity or permanence, but in the everyday substances that sustain life.

  • For AlDowayan, newly uncovered histories such as Hinat's become a language through which art can engage the past. While archaeology...

    For AlDowayan, newly uncovered histories such as Hinat's become a language through which art can engage the past. While archaeology reveals fragments of lived experience, artistic imagination offers a space to contemplate what remains unknown, giving form to stories and relationships beyond the historical record

     

    Central to survival in the desert and deeply embedded in cultural memory, the date palm appears here as more than a source of nourishment; it becomes a vessel of meaning, connecting generations through shared practices, systems of care, and cultural continuity.

  • The seed, in particular, evokes forms of knowledge often carried through women's lives and transmitted through gestures, objects, labor, and everyday acts of making.
  • Echoing the open form of Hinat's necklace, a suspended structure of rope descends through space, holding hand-formed glass elements shaped...

    Echoing the open form of Hinat's necklace, a suspended structure of rope descends through space, holding hand-formed glass elements shaped like date seeds.

     

    Produced in Murano and coated with naturally colored sand from AlUla, these elements bring the landscape itself into the work.

  • Small yet resilient, the seed becomes the narrative anchor of the installation, reflecting on how humble materials can carry collective...
    Small yet resilient, the seed becomes the narrative anchor of the installation, reflecting on how humble materials can carry collective memory and how histories endure not only through archaeological evidence and written records, but also through imagination, inheritance, and lived cultural practices.