Bahraini photographer and installation artist Mashael Alsaie is drawn to the waters of her home country, the stories they tell, and the human relationship to aquatic ecologies. Her work engages local oral mythology surrounding Bahraini springs and wells to contemplate environmental degradation. Through her use of glass, textiles, photography, film, and sound, Mashael challenges existing constructed narratives around landscapes, which often anthropomorphize and feminize the land, to present a new, more empowered reading of environmental vulnerability that finds strength in communal, indigenous, and matrilineal notions of ecological caretaking.

“Gentle Porosities” is Mashael’s debut solo show and the inaugural exhibition in Hunna Art’s first permanent space, a contemporary art gallery dedicated to championing women artists from and based in the Arabian Peninsula. In the exhibition, Mashael builds on her yearslong investigation of the relationship of the body and history to the land and future. Presenting several new works of art across a range of mediums, the show brings together Mashael’s existing interdisciplinary practice to create a multisensory experience for viewers, one that captures the ethereal, alluring, and enigmatic subject of water in her world.

AGSIW spoke to Mashael to learn more about her artistic journey and how “Gentle Porosities” cements her place as a rising star in conceptual Gulf art.

AGSIW: How did you become an artist?

Mashael: I inherited art as a passion because my grandmother was an artist, and my great aunt is a porcelain painter. So, I grew up around art. How I arrived to become an artist was very much a compounding curiosity about where I’m from and what I inherit as a person existing within this matrix of understanding the world and your own body.

AGSIW: Tell us how “Gentle Porosities” came to be and what it means to you at this stage in your career.

Mashael: Océane Sailly, who is my gallerist at Hunna Art and who I’ve been working with for two years now, called me this summer, and said, “Hey, we’re opening our first space, would you like to be the first show and have your first solo with Hunna?” I was so excited about it also because I had to make a really tough decision earlier this year if I wanted to go the full-time artist route or if I wanted to continue working. It was already a huge personal artistic crisis for me, so to have a solo like this meant a lot for me in telling myself that I can do both.

I thought I was going to be presenting old work or work that exists, but I made entirely new work for the show. With regard to the glass pieces, for example, I was so inspired I decided to make new ones. I ended up making 20 new pieces for the show.

I think a lot of people from a similar generation lock themselves into the “emerging artist” box. I remember someone telling me that once you have your first solo show, you’re no longer emerging, you’re mid-career. For me, this show felt like graduation.

AGSIW: You also work for a cultural organization in Saudi Arabia. How does your professional career across the Gulf cultural sector feed into or complement your creative practice?

Mashael: It’s huge! I love talking to artists, and I also live with four other artists, so I’m always with artists talking about art or encouraging them to engage with the community. I do feel like my practice extends beyond arts practice, so, the programming that I do at the Biennale Foundation makes it more about the community.

For example, we just held an art book fair, and I was working on it at the same time as I was making my first art book. I became so inspired by all these publishers and the things that they’re bringing. I was learning about risograph printing and getting to print on RISO. It felt extremely collaborative. The negative drawback is that when you’re also creative at your workplace, it is tough to find the juice to be creative in your practice, so I just have to learn how to manage that.

AGSIW: How did you go about organizing “Gentle Porosities” spatially?

Mashael: We curated it in the form of a whirlpool. The first thing that you actually encounter is audio. I was thinking about a siren that would lure one into the show. For the work itself, I was thinking about it in terms of water levels; you start from the top where there is glitter on the water surface, and then you continue to dive deeper into the work. As you go further into the space, I really wanted the industrial materiality and the natural materiality to morph together, to transform, and to consume one another. I wanted them to feel like they were dancing: the water, ecology, land, steel, metal, glass. Then, even as you’re coming out, you come back to the glittering water. The space wasn’t that big, so I didn’t feel overwhelmed by building things, and we tried to keep things quite measured.

AGSIW: Not only was this your first solo show, but it was also your first time curating your own work. What did you learn during this process?

Mashael: It was a tough task honestly because I wanted the show to have a thesis. I wanted to curate a question, not even an answer. What ended up happening is I treated the curatorial question like an artwork itself.

There are things I learned as the curator-artist, things like the distances between works, the interaction with the architecture of the room to mimic that whirlpool that I wanted. I also had to consider, “What is my agenda, both as a curator but also for myself as an artist?” Materially, it was really important to curate myself to come out with new perspectives on my work. Then, 10 minutes after the opening, I was like, “OK, I’m done, I want to go back to the studio.”

AGSIW: What does the show’s title, “Gentle Porosities,” refer to?

Mashael: For “porosities,” I was thinking about how the land is porous and memories are porous across time, mythology, and land. But, specifically relating to water and the whirlpool, I wanted the show to feel like a living, breathing alien organism. I was really hooked onto the word “porous,” and I knew I wanted that to frame the work. I chose “gentle” because my approach is quite tender. You know how for some people, their tendency is toward something specific? I’ve realized that my tendency, starting as a photographer, is that I can’t help but render something ethereal, and that has just been my signature.

One of the new lines of thinking I had from the show ­– and I talked about this in the publication that we made for the show – is to look at ultrasounds as references of the body and the land body. So now for my next body of work, I’m going to try to work with strictly medical imagery to see how I can also make that ethereal or to see if my signature also will imprint on that.

AGSIW: Mythology features in a lot of your work. Do you feel like that helps foster a better understanding of the land and people’s relation to it?

Mashael: What it does is create a humanoid because the mythology creates a body, or a human body, out of the land body. So, when I talk about the Adhari Spring and her tears being a part of the spring and the land, then the land is feminine – it’s a woman.

Something that came to me as a revelation during this experience is that previously I had labeled a lot of my work as ecofeminist. But now I’m trying to move away from a gendered definition of land to a consideration of indigenous land practices that may be matrilineal but are not necessarily gendered in the Western construct of ecofeminism. A lot of the work I’ve been doing over the past five years about this one site – the Adhari Spring – has captured a lot of my concern about where my land is or how my land has evolved.

AGSIW: What is the main message that you want viewers to take away from the exhibition?

Mashael: My message is a reborn sensitivity to reengage with landscapes. A lot of my works are of farmlands that are destroyed or springs that are dried up. The water resource is a huge question. What I want people to take away is a heightened tenderness toward the land or a place.

In a wider context, I felt, making this show with the ongoing genocide in Palestine was a reminder that land is so precarious, destruction of land so political. I feel like the artist in me is not quite a talking head but rather the mouthpiece for inherited, collective questions of land rather than individual questions of land.