Report on Women and Power in the Middle East

Table of Contents
List of figures...................................................................................................................................................2
Research title....................................................................................................................................................1
Main keywords.................................................................................................................................................1
Summary..........................................................................................................................................................1
Rationale..........................................................................................................................................................3
Research questions.........................................................................................................................................10
Methodology..................................................................................................................................................10
Research design..........................................................................................................................................10
Methods.....................................................................................................................................................10
Islamic Geometric grid...............................................................................................................................12
Professional artist’s quotation....................................................................................................................15
Position of research in terms of discipline and community practice...............................................................16
1. Famous European pioneer artists and Grid pattern.............................................................................18
Piet Mondrian.........................................................................................................................................18
Victor Vasarely......................................................................................................................................20
2. Contemporary artists and grid pattern................................................................................................22
Peter Kogler...........................................................................................................................................22
Rechel Garrad........................................................................................................................................23
3. Jewelry and grid patterns....................................................................................................................24
Bin Dixon-WARD.................................................................................................................................24
Initial literature review...................................................................................................................................26
1. Saudi Female artists...........................................................................................................................26
Folk Saudi female artists, Fatemah Abougahas (1920-2010).................................................................26
Upper class artist, Safia Said Binzagr born in 1940...............................................................................29
Female academic artist, Eiman Elgibreen (B. 1981)..............................................................................31
2. Female artist from the middle East.....................................................................................................32
Shirin Nehat (Iranian, 1957)...................................................................................................................33
Boushra Almutawakel............................................................................................................................34
3. Books.................................................................................................................................................35
Women in Middle East: Past and present by Nikki Keddie....................................................................35
Arab Women: Between defiance and Restraint by Suhasabbagh...........................................................36
Women and Power in the Middle East by Suad Joseph and Susan Slyomovics (editors)......................37
Art and visual perception: a psychology of the creative eye by Rudolf Arnheim..................................38
Outline of progress.........................................................................................................................................40
Year 1: 2017...............................................................................................................................................40
Year 2: 2018...............................................................................................................................................40
Year 3: 2019...............................................................................................................................................40
Year 4: 2020...............................................................................................................................................40
Bibliography..................................................................................................................................................41

List of figures
Figure 1 Fatemah Abou Gahas with her famous Alqat and Alnagash Paintings, Asir, South of Saudia
Arabia......................................................................................................................................................4
Figure 2 Folk Saudi female artist practices "Alqatt" art..........................................................................5
Figure 3 Safeya Binzagr in front of one of her painting..........................................................................6
Figure 4 Banksy and I by Eiman Elgibreen.............................................................................................7
Figur 5 A family of Islamic geometric tiles ....................................................................13
Figur 6 Islamic geometric grid ...................................................................................13
Figur 7 Alqahtani. Fatemah. Islamic Geometric Patterns drawing.............................................14
Figure 8 Alqahtani. Fatemah digital Islamic Geometric Patterns..............................................14
Figure 9 Hannah Wilke...........................................................................................................................15
Figure 10 Adrian Piper..........................................................................................................................16
Figure 11 Cave painting, Western Europe, created during the upper Palaeolithic between 45,000 and
20,000 years ago.....................................................................................................................................17
Figure 12 Australia’s rock art heritage...................................................................................................17
Figure 13 Piet Mondrian.........................................................................................................................18
Figure 14 Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930....................................................................18
Figure 15 Piet, Mondrian, “Broadway Boogie-Woogie,” 1942-3. Oil on Canvas..................................19
Figure 16 Victor, Vasarely......................................................................................................................20
Figure 17 “Vega,” 1957. Acrylic on Canvas..........................................................................................20
Figure 18 Peter Kogler.1959,Peter Kogler .Sigmund Freud Museum.2015...........................................22
Figure 19 Peter, Kogler, “Photo/Foto Vincent Everarts,” 2016..............................................................22
Figure 20 Rachel Garrard........................................................................................................................23
Figure 21 Rechel, Garrad, “Geometric Void: Oil paint on plastic,” 2010. Oil Paint............................23
Figure 22: Rachel, Garrard, “Geometric void Painting: Latex on plastic,” 2010...................................23
Figure 23 Dixon-Ward............................................................................................................................24
Figure 24 Dixon-Ward, Mix of traditional jewellery skills and digital technology................................24
Figure 25 Mix of traditional jewellery skills and digital technology......................................................25
Figure 26 Fatima AbouGahas with her famous Alqat and Alnagash Paintings, Asir, South of Saudia
Arabia.....................................................................................................................................................26
Figure 27 Saudi innate artists in front of their Alqat and Alnagash paintings, Asir,.............................28
Figure 28 Safeya Binzagr........................................................................................................................29
Figure 29 Nuptial Series, Jeddah, western Saudi Arabia........................................................................29
Figure 30 Binzagr. Safiya ."Zabun".1950..............................................................................................30
Figure 31 Eiman Elgibreen.....................................................................................................................31
Figure 32 Does A Face Make a Difference? Mixed media on limestone bricks.Overall size: 60x200x100
cm. Private collection / Courtesy of the Artist........................................................................................31
Figure 33 Eiman Elgibreen, What Are You Looking at? Mixed media on wood. 32x36.cm. Private
collection / Courtesy of the Artist..........................................................................................................32
Figure 34 Shirin Neshat.........................................................................................................................33
Figure 35 Neshat. Shirin. Rapture, 1999................................................................................................33
Figur 36 Neshat. Shirin. Hands. 2005..............................................................................
.................................................33
Figure 37 Boushra
Almutawakel...............................................................................................................34
Figure 38 The Hijab Series: Mother,Daughter, and Doll, 2010.............................................................34

Research title
Creativism versus conservatism: A creative exploration of factors that influence the Saudi
Arabian women’s art practice.
Main keywords
 Saudi woman art
 Creative practice
 Geometric grid pattern
Summary
This study attempts to examine the position of Saudi women as artists before and after the
1980 oil revolution and explores the ways that women express her thoughts, emotions, intuitions,
and desires within Saudi Arabian conservative society. Along with this, the research also discusses
the content of work done by female artists that made their art paramount. Apart from this, the
research discusses the works of the Saudi Arabian female artists with respect to symbolism and
content. It also discusses the artist’s intellectual and ideological thinking, which helped to create
the artworks. The study tries to understand how these female artists expressed their feelings about
their surroundings through their artworks. This in turn helped them to bring about new changes in
the artwork while keeping intact the original content. This study also depicts how art was used to
depict the society and culture of the people of that era. Here, special attention will be focused on
three artists - Fatemah Abougahas (1920-2010), Safya Said Binzagr (1940-2000) and Eiman
Elgibreen (contemporary artist), representing folk Saudi, upper Saudi and academic female artists
as a whole.
My project will contain two components: the creative practice and the written dissertation. My
creative practice will be expressed through paintings and sculptures, these being tools of
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investigation and the outcomes of inquiry into the work and characteristics of Saudi female art. Both
context and commentary model will be used to emphasize the relationships between artworks and
written dissertations. In the context model the exegesis performs the role of contextualizing text. The
commentary model focuses on the creative process and the creative works1. The paintings, digital
designs and sculptures will be the main components in focusing this dissertation, which will
involve the integration of concurrent theoretical investigations and studio developments. The
artifacts will be used as a manifestation of the experience of women artists in my native country of
Saudi Arabia.
The methodology of this study is based on the principles of action research and will take a
cyclic approach involving four steps of planning (visualization), acting (practices), observing
(impact), as well as reflecting (results) based on the developments of the studio practices. The
context model will be incorporated in my critical analysis of artworks by Saudi women 2. The
context model will ensure that the information is well organized, and expressed in a simple and
structured manner to better understand the content as an interpretive method of inquiry into the
understanding of the nature and spirit of Saudi woman art3.
1 Milech, B.H. &Schilo, A. (2004). ‘Exit Jesis’: relating the exegesis and the creative/production components of
a research thesis. TEXT, special issue No 3.Retrieved July 2, 2008, from
http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue3/milechschilo.htm.
2 Milech, B.H. &Schilo, A. (2004). ‘Exit Jesis’: relating the exegesis and the creative/production components of
a research thesis. TEXT, special issue No 3.Retrieved July 2, 2008, from
http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue3/milechschilo.htm.
According to (Milech and Schilo 2004) the commentary model is “explanatory annotation” and focuses on the
creative process and the creative works. Its a reflexive, personal and subjective account by the researcher, who
speaks as an insider who draws on what they uniquely know and have experienced in relation to their creative
works and processes.
3 Chen, Qiang, Zheng Song, Jian Dong, Zhongyang Huang, Yang Hua, and Shuicheng Yan. "Contextualizing
object detection and classification." IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence 37, no. 1
(2015): 13-27.
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The Commentary model2, involves an annotation and explication on the artworks, as "the
means by which the investigation [entailed in the creative or production process] is explained or
described"4. This model proves advantageous in establishing the relationship between the
dissertation and the creative or production component of a research project - the documents
discusses the project’s creative work, to explore or examine the theory-practice divide. The
creative and production practices are the primary terms of the dissertation and academic writing is
the supplement.5
Rationale
As a Saudi female artist, I find this PhD program is an opportunity to explore the experience of
contemporary art in Saudi Arabia through the perspective of a woman artist that belongs to the
same conservative society. Consideration of the contemporary period of art from a creative
perspective will draw my attention for carrying out this proposal. I think execution of this proposal
will result in the outpouring of my inner thoughts and memories, which I have regarding the
artistic experience of the Saudi Arabian female artists in particular. Optimizing my search and
focus on the work of Fatemah Abougahas, Safia Said Binzagr and Eiman Elgibreen, will represent
the Saudi Arabian female artists as a whole. The obstacles like the conservative nature of Saudi
people, lack of public art and women having limited chance to engage in public activities, which
attaches a negative connotation to Saudi women’s art, is important to the proposal to project these
4 Www.aawp.org.au. 2017. "Cite A Website - Cite This For Me". Aawp.Org.Au. http://www.aawp.org.au/wp-
content/uploads/2015/03/Berridge.pdf.
5 Context model has been identified by Milech & Schilo (2004) - Queensland University of Technology -, the
exegesis performs the role of a contextualising text. In this model, the researcher chooses a topic of discussion
from one or more of the wider contexts of the creative practice, such as theoretical and philosophical
frameworks, an historical or critical analysis of related practitioners and precedents, or the professional and
industrial conditions of the practice.
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artist’s success stories6. Categorical descriptions of success will be given to each of highlighted
Saudi female artist.
The first category is female artists, who explore nature through artistic instincts. This process of
exploration excavated their inner sense of beauty. Fatemah Abougahas can be considered as one of
the “Alqatt”7 art leaders of this category. Women specialized in “Alqatt” art carry out lines,
engravings and aesthetic formations. This abstract art form expresses the spiritual reality of the
mystic or the innate artistic senses. This helps to distinguish the abstract art from the demolition of
artistic images, excessive distortion of realistic forms and transforming images into meaningless
lines, dots, spots, surfaces and three-dimensional shapes. It involves the use of decisive patterns
and primary colours, which are welcoming as well as technical. This art mainly adorns the stone
home interiors of Asir in the southern region of Saudi Arabia8. Here women follow the tradition of
house painting, since the home is dominated by the females.
6 Ttu-ir.tdl.org. 2017. "Cite A Website - Cite This For Me". Ttu-Ir.Tdl.Org.
https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/ttu-ir/bitstream/handle/2346/63583/KATTAN-DISSERTATION-2015.pdf?sequence=1
7 Alqat and Alnagash“ art is the local name of traditional art in Asir home in south of Saudi Arabia
8 Al-Hababi, Haifa. The Art Of Women In’Asir (Saudi Arabia). Eigenverlag/Self-published, 2012.
4
Figure 1 Fatima AbouGahas with her famous Alqat and Alnagash Paintings, Asir, South of Saudia Arabi

Figure 2 folk Saudi female artist practices "Alqatt" art
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The Saudi oil revolution9 of 1938 enhanced the social and economic support for female artists
through art works10. The oil discovery was an added advantage for them in terms as if they were
portraying their inner thoughts, emotions and feelings through the means of paintbrush. One of the
mentionable names here is Safia Said Binzagr11. Binzagr was born in an established merchant
family located in Jeddah in the year 1940. She learnt art from Egypt and earned a degree from St
Martin’s School of Art in 1965.
She was influenced by artists like Giotto Fra Angelico and Cezanne but later on developed her own
independent style, which were adapted from her heritage. Binzagr uses oil paints to pastels,
watercolors, etchings and drawings. Her work depicts the daily lives of the people of Saudi Arabia.
9 Saudi Arabian oil was first discovered by the Americans in commercial quantities at Dammam oil well No. 7 in
1938 in what is now modern Dhahran city.
10 Ulrichsen, Kristian Coates. "The Gulf and the Global Economy." In The Gulf States in International Political
Economy, pp. 15-35. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016.
11Arthistory.knoji.com. 2017. "Safia Binzagr: Pioneer Of The Artistic Movement In Saudi
Arabia". Arthistory.Knoji.Com. https://arthistory.knoji.com/safia-binzagr-pioneer-of-the-artistic-movement-in-
saudi-arabia/
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Figure 3 Safeya Binzagr in front of one of her painting