Feminist Materialities in the Work of Three MENA Artists

Contemporary art is witnessing renewed engagement with materials rooted in domestic and craft traditions. Artists exploring how materiality intersects with ancestral knowledge, context, labour, and ecology have turned to clay, wool, silk, plant pigments, and hand-dyed fibre to articulate layered forms of expression. Working with such material practices involves processes that privilege tactile knowledge, concentration, and embodied time. Clay forms carry the imprint of hand and land. Pigments derived from plants and minerals capture the tones of local environments. Textile practices involve slow accumulation, repetition, and the incremental building of form. These qualities lend themselves to sustained reflection on how materials mediate social experience and on how artistic labour connects to land, resource, and body. 

 

Across a wide range of societies, craft traditions have long carried social meaning and functioned as powerful modes of non-verbal communication. The weaving circles of West Asia, the tatreez^[1] embroidery of Palestine, the porcelain kilns of Tang China, the pottery guilds of Japan, and the dyeing workshops of Africa and Latin America illustrate how ways of making have acted as markers of social identity and systems through which communities organise and understand one another. Such practices have, however, frequently been excluded from the fine art canon, particularly within Western academic traditions that privileged media such as oil painting or sculpture and upheld the figure of the single artist. As a result, forms rooted in inherited technique and collective making were overlooked, despite involving complex systems of production and transmission. These communal practices also embody gendered legacies shaped by domestic life and the ecologies of care that sustain households. For many women artists, returning to clay or fibre opens a conversation with these lineages while interrogating the patriarchal and cultural hierarchies that constrained their reception in art history. 

 

The feminist use of craft within modern and contemporary art globally gained momentum in the late twentieth century. Although women had always worked with textiles and clay, artists from the 1960s onwards, including Judy Chicago, Faith Ringgold, and Miriam Schapiro, began to foreground these materials as sites of critique.Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974-79) exemplified this shift. The installation’s triangular table, set with place settings dedicated to women from myth and history, transformed domestic materials such as porcelain and embroidery into a platform for political reflection. By assembling a monumental work from media associated with the home, and loading it with motifs that recall the female anatomy, Chicago raised questions regarding participation, value, and exclusion within cultural narratives. By invoking the image of the table, the work pressed on broader feminist concerns over participation - who is invited to sit there, who can speak, whose labour is deemed intellectual, and how patriarchal systems police entry into cultural discourse.

 

This feminist lineage has continued to evolve in the twenty-first century, shaped by artists responding to site-specific, temporal, and inherited conditions. Within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), this current finds renewed expression in the practices of artists including Aya Haidar (Lebanese-British); Hoda Tawakol (Egyptian-German); and Manal AlDowayan (KSA), who work with textiles and ceramics to probe entanglements of gender, social expectation, and embodied experience.

 

 

For Haidar, embroidery is a way to understand how care, labour, and social identity intersect. Employing thread and fabric as tools of analysis, she situates domestic craft as a critical language through which women’s lived conditions can be rendered visible and subject to analysis. Her Tolteesh (2019) series demonstrates this strategy; the works consist of embroidered phrases taken from catcalls heard on the streets of Beirut, restitched onto patterned fabrics reminiscent of 1970s household interiors. Each phrase is translated from Arabic into English: “Your heart is fire and I’m an ashtray,” “Your mum must be a bee,” “Do you come in jello flavour?” - then sewn in bright, uneven colours that initially appear playful. This aesthetic contrast draws attention to the dissonance between the aggression of public harassment and the familiarity of the fabric that holds it. The use of translation signals a shift in power. Once the phrases are carried into English and slowed through the act of stitching, they lose their force and reveal the awkwardness and banality of the original encounter. The household associations of the cloth bring these public utterances into an intimate realm of reflection, where the viewer is encouraged to confront what is often normalised. The act of embroidery, patient and intentional, counters the speed with which harassment occurs. Through this process, Haidar turns moments of violation into authored, visible statements that can be examined rather than absorbed. Tolteesh embodies Haidar’s broader interest in using the aesthetics of repair to explore how women negotiate and interpret forms of social control.

 

 

In her Soleless series (2018-2024), Haidar, again, comes back to embroidery to register lived experience. Developed during a residency that involved sustained conversations with Syrian refugees, the works translate stories of flight, loss, and survival into embroidered scenes stitched onto the worn soles of shoes. These shoes still carry the traces of movement: frayed seams, buckled leather, and fatigued material compressed by distance. Haidar overlays these textures with small, carefully rendered images rooted in the narratives she encountered. Crossing Borders (2024) shows a mother carrying one child while others walk behind her, their bodies arranged with a gravity that evokes exhaustion and persistence. The simplicity of the image heightens its emotional force. It distils the experience into an outline that is at once accessible and devastating. In Overboard (2024), she records the testimony of Iman, whose baby was thrown into the sea by a trafficker during an attempted crossing. The childlike appearance of the stitching draws the viewer in before confronting them with the violence of the event. This approach resists distance and ensures these experiences are neither abstracted nor ignored. The choice of the shoe as surface is central. Shoes are intimate objects shaped by the weight and pace of their wearer; they are also items often discarded once worn-down. By using them as ground for embroidery, Haidar restores value to what has carried the physical burden of survival, preserving stories that risk erasure and giving form to experiences that are difficult to articulate in words. 

 

Haidar exposes the pressures entrenched in speech, conflict, and domestic material, while Hoda Tawakol turns to the gendered body as a site of negotiation and transformation. Her practice zones-in on embodied form, examining how cultural expectations take hold, become physical, and are reworked through textile and sculptural process. Working with fabric, dye, thread, and textile-based structures provides Tawakol with a framework for examining how bodies are shaped, disciplined, and imagined. Having lived between the UK, France, Germany, and Egypt, she draws on a constellation of cultural encounters to explore ritual, pressure, and the spiritual dimensions of bodily experience. Her practice includes sewn, stuffed, dyed, and assembled textile forms that treat fabric as a kind of skin. Through stretching, binding, and staining, she considers how women’s bodies absorb social expectation while still retaining capacity for transformation.

 

 

Her Mummy series (2020) encapsulates this enquiry. Using bold-hued nylon stockings filled with rice, Tawakol produced swollen masses that strain under their own weight before freezing the structures in resin. These bulbous figures appear overextended, but they hold an energetic presence that evokes both humour and discomfort. Her work builds on a lineage of artists who have modelled the female figure through dysmorphic, inflated, or collapsing silhouettes - a trajectory exemplified by Sarah Lucas’s Nuds (2009-ongoing), which exposes the distortions produced through objectification. Lucas approaches the spectacle of the eroticised figure; however, Tawakol turns toward pressure and the unseen labour of maintaining coherence within social expectation. Her choice of nylon is vital. Closely tied to women’s clothing, it carries immediate associations with the gendered body, yet its material properties push this connection further. Flexible, absorbent, and easily distorted, nylon behaves like skin under pressure, conveying how the body can be stretched into compliance. Once set in resin, her forms enter a state of suspension that crystallises strain. The title Mummy conjures multiple meanings: the ancient techniques of wrapping the dead, the maternal figure responsible for care, and the immobilised body. These layered references allow Tawakol to reflect on fatigue, protection, and ritual preparation. Spiritual overtones emerge too; her works evoke the transitional states associated with Tawakol’s Egyptian heritage, recalling practices that prepare the body for its movement from life to death.

 

The Sarcophagus series (2019-2020) shifts the conversation from bodily exhaustion to a state of limbo. Here, Tawakol reimagines the sarcophagus through a feminist lens, drawing on Egyptian mortuary traditions to consider how women’s bodies are shaped through ceremony, protection and control. Through stuffing, binding, tufting, and hand-dyeing, she builds energetic surfaces that capture the tension between ritual enclosure and ongoing bodily presence. Sarcophagus No. 2 (2020) develops the eye motif through dangling ceramic pupils and dye patterns that resemble an iris. The central vortex seems to watch the viewer, recalling the protective eye in Egyptian visual culture and the politics of the gaze. Rather than sealing the body away, the enclosure is a site of alertness - suggesting that surveillance and ritual remain active within it. The fringed forms around the eye echo the uncanny association of posthumous hair growth, reinforcing the sense of a body that continues beyond physical limits. The artist handles the sarcophagus as a structure that contains an active, observing body rather than a still or extinguished one. For Tawakol, wrapping and binding techniques draw on textile processes historically associated with women’s work and care, allowing her to probe questions of constraint, protection, and ritual preparation. Through these strategies, she mobilises material process to connect feminist concerns around the regulation of women’s bodies with Egyptian visual and ceremonial traditions that understand the body as established through custom, history, and inherited practice.

 

 

Within the MENA, the gendered experience is bound to the politics of land and law and shaped by material lineages that emerged through centuries of trade and exchange.^[2] For many artists, these inheritances offer a means to register how social frameworks, legacy and geography can be embodied. It is within this terrain that Manal AlDowayan situates her practice. Her immersive installations often draw from the visual codes, resources, and procedures of Saudi Arabia to consider how women inhabit space under evolving conditions of reform, surveillance, and expectation. AlDowayan returns repeatedly to the question of movement and its limits, exploring the friction between control and desire for mobility. This is captured in Suspended Together(2011), first shown at the 54th Venice Biennale, the installation filled the space above with hundreds of white porcelain doves each imprinted with a Saudi woman’s travel documents at a time when mobility required male consent. What does it mean to ask, publicly and insistently: who is permitted to move, and who decides? As with Judy Chicago’s demand to know who sits at the table, the question is a form of pressure.

 

A solitary standing dove from the collection condenses this experience into one figure. Cast in porcelain, it is grounded rather than airborne; its wings are folded, asserting stillness. Travel documents - stamped signatures, bureaucratic seals, official scripts - cover its chest, transforming the creature into an index of regulation. The symbolism of a carrier of messages immobilised makes tangible the idea of halted agency. Its figurine-like appearance evokes the ornamental objects found in domestic interiors, pointing to how women’s lives can be reduced to categorial forms, accessories, and bureaucratic templates. Porcelain, produced through refined clay and extreme firing, carries simultaneous associations of fragility and resolve. AlDowayan mobilises this material complexity to reflect on how women’s lived experiences are conditioned by precarity, shaped through pressure and sustained structures of control.

 

 

This negotiation of embodied experience develops further in Watch Before You Fall (2019), where AlDowayan looks at how shifts in material and scale can capture various states of embodied experience. The series emerged from close examination of publications authored by men to instruct women on how to conduct themselves in the public sphere in Saudi Arabia. The title recalls a warning commonly directed towards women at the point of entering public life: “watch before you fall.” Many of these texts have since fallen out of circulation under recent legal reform, yet AlDowayan’s project questions whether their influence has truly receded. In these books, women appear as veiled silhouettes or flowers poised to wilt. Curtains float, haunting and weightless. Women are transparent, but male figures appear as animals or predators. These motifs circulate throughout the series; AlDowayan revives them to question: who writes the rules, who must follow them, and how moral guidance functions as discipline.

 

Material process structures her investigations. Ephemeral textiles, fragile porcelain and corroded metal register states of strain, instability and transformation. Installed at human scale, totems, suspended textile forms, porcelain sheets, and metal structures lean, tilt or rest in positions of uncertainty. Totem 3: Woman Behind Curtain (2019), printed in black ink on natural linen, stems from the artist’s interview with a psychiatrist who, after twenty-five years in Saudi public hospitals, discussed some of the most troubling cases she had witnessed, many involving women. The slight lean of the structure evokes the emotional and physical precarity described in the testimonies that informed the series. AlDowayan has described^[3] these structures as objects of healing, created through stitching and stuffing - processes that mirror the labour of staying upright under psychological duress. A hazy palette invokes the terrain of Saudi Arabia and pigments traditionally used in domestic craft and architectural ornament.

 

 

Within the installation, soft, organic forms are punctuated with harsher surfaces. In I Wonder Do You See Me(2019), two tiny desert roses^[4] are cast in layers of rusted metal. Their stacked formation recalls the mineral process that produces the crystal; but the icon also carries broader cultural associations of femininity, comparable to the English rose^[5] as a symbol of fleeting beauty and virtue. Metal implies durability, yet the desert rose occurs only when heat, pressure and sediment align. AlDowayan’s structure, then, is produced through both environmental force and symbolic projection. Alongside the roses, Just Paper (2019) comprises a cluster of porcelain scrolls that enclose fragments of prescriptive texts once taken as household reference manuals. Folded like archival records, they give material weight to language that once ordered gendered conduct. Their delicacy evokes the risk of fracture, suggesting that instruction is contingent and can always be shattered. In sharing these fragmented histories and bringing them into new arrangements, AlDowayan considers what might be preserved, reconsidered or reauthored. Installed at scale, her works form partial architectural environments, inviting viewers to experience a state of precarity, spatially. Over two decades, AlDowayan has traced shifts in policy and lived experience in Saudi Arabia, examining how women navigate visibility, reform and expectation. Material decisions register these pressures, allowing the experience of social transition to be absorbed through surface, weight, and encounter.

Materiality, for these artists, is a way to understand and express how women encounter patriarchy, bodily strain and territorial conditions shaped by legacy, governance and belief. Clay absorbs heat, fabric stretches under pressure, and thread accumulates time while retaining traces of experience. These materials register the gendered body and operate as powerful instruments of analysis, translating lived conditions into tactile forms through texture, surface and duration. Haidar, Tawakol, and AlDowayan reveal that the structures shaping how women move, are spoken to, and experience pressure, are neither fixed nor beyond question. Through material practice, these conditions are brought into view, examined and contested with critical force.