HEND AL-MANSOUR
Artist Statement
I am a Minnesotan transplant who was born and raised in Saudi Arabia. I left my original home longing for independence and freedom of expression. After being an amateur artist alongside a medical career for over 17 years, I quit medicine to give art my full attention. I obtained an MFA and embarked on a full life of art within the lush Twin Cities artistic culture. I obtained a master in art history for deeper understanding of art.
My work addresses gender equality and sexual independence. My childhood memories are a reservoir of endless inspiration and passion. Class systems, women’s space, traditions, and aesthetics all interacted in the small but ancient city of Hofuf in Eastern Arabia where I was born and grew up. There, the clash between beauty and austerity parallels the rivalry between vivid colors of clothes and furniture and the monochrome of the desert.
Stylized and flattened human figure inhabits the center of my image. Patterns of henna and sadou (traditional Bedouin weaving), Arabic calligraphy, and Islamic design, are affectations to augment and contextualize the figure. Figurations are controversial in Islamic art and therefore relevant to the issues I address.
I work in two main media. Screen printing and installation. My limited editions screen-prints generally have two pallets. One is vibrant, almost gaudy, and the other is monochromatic made of henna as a dye and as ink. Henna is my hometown’s unnamed goddess. Grandmothers make sure that their communities have adequate henna adornments.
My print sizes tend to be large and sometimes large enough to provide for my second medium: installation. I use rolls of printed fabric or paper in building spaces and passages for the audience to walk through where they encounter shrines with mural paintings, sculptures and sound tracks; all tell stories about women.
Past Group Exhibitions: Sunshowers, 2023 Structures of Feeling, 2022 Fractal Nature, 2021 Forever is composed of Nows, 2020 Active directions of the mind, 2019 Facing Disjunction, 2018
Gathering Differences, 2017