This body of work began as an exploration of censorship in Saudi Arabia and it's effects on visual communication. While there is a lack of consistency from region to region, overall, images are highly scrutinized and controlled. Some superficial examples of this would be skirts lengthened and sleeves crudely added with black markers in magazines or blurred out faces on billboards.
I tried to apply the language of the censors to my personal photographs. I began making line drawings, omitting faces and skin. Keeping only the essentials preserved the anonymity of my subjects. This allowed me to circumvent, and comment on, some of the cultural taboos associated with photography. Namely the stigma attached to bringing the â??personal portraitâ??, commonly reserved for the private domestic space, into a public sphere.
It became a game of how much can you tell with how little. When reduced to sketches, the images achieved enough distance from the original photographs that neither subjects nor censors could find them objectionable. For me, they became autonomous, relatable, pared down narratives.
I've always been interested in how photography functions, and I try to undermine any documentary authority it may possess as a medium. I've always felt that a photograph functions more like a memory, in that it's a singular perspective of a split second in time, entirely subjective and hence impressionable. By etching these drawings back into film and printing them in a traditional darkroom, I'm trying to point out how malleable it is as a medium, even before digital manipulation became so advanced and accessible. With these interventions emerges a highly coded and self-reflexive language. What also interests me is that the information omitted (faces, skin and emulsion) creates an image of its own, as do the censors to our cultural landscape.
About
Jowhara AlSaud (b. 1978) Holds a BA in Film Theory from Wellesley College and an MFA in Fine Arts from The School of The Museum of Fine Arts/ Tufts University. AlSaud was runner-up for the 2008 Aperture Foundation Portfolio Prize, Magenta Foundationâ??s Flash Forward 2010: Emerging Photographers finalist and The International Photography Awards 2010 finalist. She has exhibited her work internationally in group and solo shows, most recently in a group show at the Duolun Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai, China, Scope NYC 2011 art fair and Scope Miami 2010. AlSaud also had solo exhibitions at The Sultan Gallery in Kuwait , Zoom Art Miami, Witzenhausen Gallery in Amsterdam and New York. She has also exhibited at international art fairs in New York, Miami, Chicago, Palm Beach, Paris, Mexico, Dubai and Basel, Switzerland. Her work is part of the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, The Greenbox Museum, Amsterdam, Almansouriya Foundation, KSA as well as many private collections across Europe, the US and the Middle East.
