The Eternal Return of the Same: Collection

These works not only deepen AlDowayan’s nuanced interrogation of women’s shifting status within a metamorphosing Saudi society, but also intensify her exploration of new material. A nod to Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, the title The Eternal Return of the Same captures gestures of repetition and iteration undergirding the works. While the exhibition may provide a moment of reflection on the need for reckoning, it also bears AlDowayan’s hallmark critical assessment of a world rife with inequity and uncertainty.

The leg recurs in The Recline (2021), a large tapestry in which the limb morphs and mirrors itself, conjuring a reclining female form, poised above a cascade of loose, unravelled (or not yet woven) linen threads. The work exemplifies not only the notion of repetition—the leg emerging over and over in diverse media—but also the artist’s challenge to the traditional craft of weaving. The Recline, like the other works in the exhibition, exudes at once a political vitality and a sensual poetics of materiality. 

Similarly, Just Paper (2019) interrogates the textual manifestations of patriarchal power structures by taking aim at archival memory. Upending the longevity of the printed, archival form of written texts, Al Dowayan renders religious and linguistic texts in delicate rolls of fragile porcelain. Easily crushed, the porcelain rolls bear not only prescriptive religious texts like those on the two soft sculptures, but also definitions taken from a millennium-old book on the jurisprudence of the Arabic language. Here we find the extended family of words used to transcribe varying intensities of sadness, entrapment, fever, anger, tightness, insanity… Replicated and cast across a table, the vulnerable porcelain scrolls are emblematic of AlDowayan’s artistic output: strikingly beautiful works in appearance, harbouring challenging elements within. Like many artists, AlDowayan has viewed recent life through the prism of the singular, inescapable space of her London home. Her awareness of the day-in- day-out repetition of actions and gestures intensified. 

The Eternal Return of the Same conflates this recurrence of the mundane, the growing opacity of time through ritualisation, an uneasy sense of settled uncertainty, with the process of reckoning Saudi women of her generation must undertake, given the seismic changes in the Kingdom. Yet repetition, the exhibition implies, in its gentle shifting and distortion of the familiar, can become a site of newness.