Hawazin Alotaibi

Hawazin Alotaibi uses both sourced imagery and personal memorabilia. While many of the figures are collected from the Internet, others, such as the recurring theme of flowers, make their way into the work through memory. Growing up, flowers appeared as representations of womanhood and femininity in cultural and religious books the artist was given at school in Saudi Arabia. With the proliferation of social media, Alotaibi saw this same imagery increasingly appear online in scenes of male self-fashioning. This tension between traditional dogma and contemporary representation catalyses Alotaibi’s artistic examination of gender and masculinity in the face of the shifting cultural and political dynamics of the Gulf countries.