Traces and Transformations: Expo Osaka 2025, 2025年日本国際博覧会

Manal AlDowayan: Traces and Transformations is a solo exhibition presenting a selection of works that reflect AlDowayan’s deepening exploration of the intimate textures of belonging and the shifting landscapes that shape contemporary life. Manal’s practice captures personal and collective narratives, ensuring they endure. In this exhibition, the landscape becomes an active presence, woven into the works through sound, painting, sculpture, and Saudi traditional crafts. Together, they reflect a powerful vision of transformation, rooted in heritage and driven by possibility.

The exhibition opens with Songs from the Shore (2022), a participatory work commissioned for the Setouchi Triennale, one of Japan’s leading international art events. Rooted in research on rituals led by women in coastal communities, the work draws on traditional Gulf songs and practices that address the sea, often seeking protection for sailors. One such ritual involved burning palm leaves and extinguishing them in the sea, an action inspired by ancient healing methods like cauterization, symbolizing purification and protection. AlDowayan first enacted this ritual in her hometown in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, then recreated it with residents of Ibuki Island in Japan, forming a shared ceremony shaped by a common relationship to the sea. The work reflects the deep and complex bond women have long held with the ocean, marked by both love and struggle. Through collective songs and rituals, Songs from the Shore becomes an act of care and restoration,a gesture toward healing both land and spirit.

The participatory and sensorial aspects of Songs from the Shore echo across the exhibition, where sound, landscape, and craft converge to honor collective memory. Partially unwoven Sadu tapestries (June 24th, 2016 (2023), Watch Before You Fall (2023), and O’Sister (2023) ) woven by Bedouin women and paired with hand-shaped clay fragments, recall key moments in Saudi women’s lives. Nearby, The Encounter (2022), a soft sculpture inspired by the Desert Rose crystal from AlDowayan’s hometown, and The Emerging (2024), evoke quiet resilience and the growing presence of women.

This sense of collective voice and embodied memory builds toward Shifting Sands: A Battle Song (2024), first presented at the 61st Venice Biennale. In this monumental sound and sculpture installation, the voices of nearly a thousand women, gathered in workshops across Saudi Arabia, merge with the shifting rhythms of desert sands, forming a new battle song shaped by cries and landscape. For this exhibition, the work is accompanied by a documentary capturing its making.

These works are shown alongside pivotal early pieces such as Esmi (2012), where hundreds of women gather to write their names on prayer beads and collectively enounce “my name is” in defiance of social silencing, and And, I, Will I Forget? (2015), which reflects on memory and disappearance. Together, they reveal AlDowayan’s enduring engagement with visibility, erasure, and the need to remember.

Bringing together works that have not been shown side by side before, this show reveals new connections between them. Each one stands as a marker of resilience, carrying the weight of what must not be forgotten. In gathering voices and moments, AlDowayan builds an archive that refuses silence, affirming presence and continuity.