1. Perspectives: Different ways of viewing or understanding a situation.
2. Investigates: To examine or inquire systematically.
3. Complex: Intricate, involving many interconnected parts.
4. Inclusive: Including all elements or members.
5. Archive: A collection of historical documents or records.
6. Commission: An official order or assignment to create something.
7. Biennale: A cultural event that occurs every two years, often showcasing contemporary art.
8. Ambitious: Having a strong desire to achieve something significant.
9. Labyrinth: A complex structure with interconnected paths or passages.
10. Petroglyphs: Rock engravings or carvings, especially prehistoric ones.
11. Engravings: Designs or inscriptions cut into a surface.
12. Troves: A collection or store of valuable or delightful things.
13. Remnants: Remaining parts or traces of something.
14. Concept: An abstract idea or general notion.
15. Birthing: The process of giving birth or bringing something into existence.
16. Rituals: Formalized procedures or actions performed in a specific order.
17. Critique: A detailed analysis or assessment of something.
18. Sphere: A particular area of activity, expertise, or knowledge.
19. Biennials: Events or exhibitions that occur every two years.
20. Curators: Individuals responsible for selecting and organizing items for an exhibition or collection.

The global story with smart takes and fresh perspectives on one big news story every Monday to Friday from the BBC World Service. Search for the global story wherever you get your BBC podcasts to find out more. Welcome to in the studio from the BBC World Service, the programme that investigates the creative process. When you’re making an artwork that is very complex, I really give it a lot of time, and so what I do is I just absorb and read and it just sits in my brain and in my body and sometimes tears come. And this time we’re focusing on an artist who started out 20 years ago challenging the role of women in the arab society she grew up in, questioning how history had been recorded and imagining a more inclusive future. There was just a few that were doing this. There was really very, very blurry past to look at. There was no archive, there was no standing. Artists and exhibitions I can go to and like, oh, here’s an elder artist, I can ask them questions. Manal Aldoigan is now one of the most internationally known artists from Saudi Arabia. You have public commissions, museums being built, and they need to acquire works. You have land, art, you have design. People want you to get involved in hotels. It’s just crazy right now, showing work at the Guggenheim in New York, the British Museum and the LACMA in LA. Soon she’ll be representing her country at the Venice Biennale, and I’m delighted to be given exclusive access to Manal as she continues her work on a huge multi year project. They came to me and said, dream, dream, with no limitations. So I just made up an artwork. A few years later, they came back to me and said, well, we like it. We want to make it. Now we have reached the point where we have a drawing, we have a layout. Once complete, this amazing commission called Oasis of stories will have a permanent home in Saudi Arabia’s astounding new Valley of arts. This will be a place of exploration. It’s not easily reached. It’s not a guided tour that you can do in a know. A sense of discovery sits within this kind of landscape. I’m Melissa Grundland, an arts journalist working all over the world. And this is in the studio. Manal Aldoian, saudi artist from the BBC World Service opening Manal Adoeyan studio is based here in north London in a quiet mezzanine filled with books, mackettes and sketches. Come on in. How are you? I’m good. Hi. Sorry, I’m just getting sidetracked already. This is where my studio is, this balcony. Can you separate work and life, or are you always mixing the two. I mix the two. This is a unique approach, I think now I’m realising, because I have a studio always inside my home, throughout my life or throughout my artistic career, so that I can work all the time. Where are we going now? To the studio. I love these little rugs. I mean, it feels more saudi. It does, like a little matchless here. Well, those pillows are from Marakish. There you go. I had my honeymoon in Marakish. I’m meeting Manal as she returns from a trip to Saudi Arabia, where she’s been continuing her work on her most ambitious artwork yet. The project started in 2016, is still ongoing, and probably be finished in 2026. It’s a long time to build an artwork. Ten years? Yeah. So the project is inspired in form by old town in Alola, and it’s a mud city that has existed for about 600 years. The last inhabitants were living there in 1983. They left it and relocated to suburban areas. That’s wild that they were living there for so long. Yeah. And with no electricity and no water systems, it was meant to be a winter city. And then in the summers, they moved back to their farms, where everything exists and that’s more comfortable. The concept started with my earliest visits to Alhalan 2012, and I’ve always noticed that the preservation of mud walls is an obsession. Mud walls cannot stay without human interaction. And now that the old town has no humans in it, what does it mean to have walls protected without the stories? So that was my first thinking, standing on this high mountain, where you can see all the structures, they’re falling apart and very, very empty and dark. Then I also walked around al ula, and everywhere in Ala, every corner, you will always find rock inscriptions written by humans for thousands and thousands of years in different languages, coming from different cultures, religions. And they inscribed their animals, they inscribed their names, prayers, tools, stories, wars, battles. And I started to wonder with the protection of all the places of al Ula under the UNESCO heritage sites type of rules. And the people there are also protected, whereas their narrative. And so I decided that I will use the form of the walls of the old town because of its closeness to them. And it was their last dwelling together before everybody discovered them and create a series of walls in this beautiful valley, flanked by two mountains. On these walls, I will be engraving the stories of the people of Al Ula that I’ve been collecting now for about a year. And you have up here, behind where you’re sitting, you have all these little rocks placed on each other. What are those? These are rocks that I’ve collected over the years from Al Ula with permission, as it is a protected site. I couldn’t bear leaving al Ula. I’m in love, really, and I’m obsessed with a landscape that is not mine. And I just keep going back to it and trying to think about why. Why do I love it so much? Why do I feel like maybe past life I had something to do with this place? And so it started with one rock from every visit. I’ve now been to Al Ula over now 39 times. My next trip is coming up. It’ll be my 40th trip today. Alala is being developed by Saudi as a premium tourist and cultural destination. They are building hotels, museums, heritage centres, as well as the large scale public artworks of Wadi Alfan, or valley of arts. I’m part of the first batch of five artists that have been selected. The selection includes James Terrell, Michael Heitzer, Agnes Dennis Ahmed Matar and myself. Wadi Alfan and the art that sits there will be a place of exploration. It’s not easily reached, it’s not a guided tour that you can do in a. Know, a sense of discovery sits within this kind of landscape. So you probably go out on horseback, know, go hiking and encounter my work. And then miles later, you’ll encounter another work by James Terrell. And then you hike through, maybe a jeep will come in to save you and drive you to the next spot and where you will look at Agnes Dennis’s work. And so the idea is for you to really connect with the landscape and use the artworks that are placed there as markers. And once you get to an artwork, maybe that’s where you want to end up, one artwork and you want to spend the whole day there, set up your tent, sleep, wake up the next day and go to the next artwork. That is sort of the idea. Around land art and its permanence. Manal’s work, Oasis of stories, will honour the legacy of Alala’s inhabitants. She and her team will build a vast installation of walls based on the layout of the ancient mud brick old town, the mountains. I’ve used them sort of as observation spaces so you can climb the mountain and look at the artwork as a whole. Another alternative way to experience and sit is just use your feet and walk through it. These walls are going to be sort of set up in a labyrinth, not a maze, and then the walls will have inscriptions on them that you can sit and contemplate. And look at and think about. And it concludes with a beautiful view. This is the prize that you end up looking over, an amazing, never ending landscape of palms. On these walls, she will carve drawings that tell the stories of those who live today in Al Ula, just like their ancestors carved petroglyphs to tell their own stories thousands of years ago. So here is a map that I’ve stuck on my door to my studio, because it’s the largest space I have. What I did is I placed the map of the old town under it and started tracing the northern and southern facing walls. It doesn’t look like a map of a town. It just looks like kind of sketch marks alongside a valley. And this is a step, one of sort of conveying the idea and creating the spaces. So you’ll see here, coming right across horizontally, is this empty space, which is really where the mountain that sits at the heart of the old town exists. But we don’t have a mountain here, so we’ve left it empty. And I think it’s a great location for when you walk through the artwork. That’s a space to contemplate. There’s a few spaces that you see here at the bottom that are sort of square, like another space up here. This was the mosque. So that was sort of the community centre where everybody gathered to talk and have conversations. Down here is where the school was for the boys. Another one is a school for the girls. There’s a place where orphans were kept and cared for. And how come you’ve only done the north and south facing walls, kind of not making squares, but just making lines? First of all, the journey that people took to enter Alurla was a north south journey. So that was the first indicator. The second thing is the sun, the way it rises and sets on these walls. And it does rise very beautifully from this angle, from the top, and then sets. And so the shadows just move like a beautiful way. And shadow is very important in the desert because you have nothing else to cover you from the sun. And I’m hoping that during the day, people can still visit this artwork and use the shadows as a space for cooling to get these drawings. Manal has spent the year travelling back and forth to Alaba to conduct workshops with local residents. Well, to create a public artwork is one challenge, but to create a public artwork in a community that doesn’t have public artworks or a museum or a gallery is a completely different setting, and you have to approach it in a very different way. You have to make sure that you’re not an artist that’s landing on the community, dropping your art and getting out. You have to build trust. And then there’s the responsibility. As an artist, I’m bringing a language, my language, to a landscape that has existed historically for millennia. And who am I? Nothing. I’m a dot in this story of humanity. So I need to be very respectful of how I place this artwork. This is her typical method, listening to the ideas of others and learning about their lives, and then transforming their stories into her own artworks. The reaction has been a lot of poetry that has hidden advice for the future. There is a lot of drawings of homes because of the change in the structure of living in Alhalla. So, used to live in a mud house, and then now you live in a modern house, and you still go to your grandfather’s farm, but you don’t know how long this farm is going to last, because nobody wants to work in farming anymore. Most youth want to work as rangers and storytellers for all the tourists coming into town. So, yeah, there is an understanding of this loss, but also an excitement for the future. I have had children draw things like the shops, the new shops that have opened in Ala, the ones with english text on their banners. I’ve had them draw Ronaldo, Cristiano Ronaldo. And at first, I said no to the t shirt. He’s in the team in Riyadh. What does it have to do with Ala? But then my whole team came to me and said, listen, having Maradona, when he arrived in Italy, this is people that love football. But he changed something. And Cristiano Ronaldo arriving in Saudi Arabia has created an energy among the youth, and Al Ula is not exempt from this energy. So we’ve accepted all the Ronaldo jerseys. So you really have an imprint of what Saudi Arabia is going through. But through the eyes of this very small northern community, I told them to think about this artwork as something that will stand for a hundred years. Anywhere you go, you will find a rock that has an inscription. Somebody has left a trace. People, for some reason, felt this urge to write their stories in Al Ula. And then I started wondering, all right, these are all the kingdoms that came before. Who are the current custodians of this place, the people of Al Ula? Where’s their story? Are they just going to remain as the storytellers of the kingdoms before them? But I think their story is also very important, and it’s a continuation to what was written before them. So this artwork will carry engravings of the drawings, and in that way you can go see the UNESCO heritage sites, the tombs, the rock inscriptions. That’s history. And then you come to the contemporary, and that’s where you see the stories of the current people that live in Ala. What are their concerns? What are their gods? What are their tools and their animals and the way they dwelled and lived. You’re giving them a voice. I’m giving them a gift, which is an artwork that belongs to them. So what are you doing here, Mana? A lot of young people are amazing artists. They bring me and they show me incredible drawings. I’m just stunned. And so I was looking at her artwork. It was me saying that it’s very hard to draw sometimes. And she had drawn a fig tree that she has in her garden. And I told her, either make it humongous, the drawing, or make it small but very detailed so that I can copy it onto the wall. You were very maternal in it. You could watch you drawing her out. So this was the young boys football club. They attended one of my workshops. They are so well behaved. Their captains had gathered them in a special location in the palm grove that I was running the workshop, and they had prepared a shout out to me. And so they say, thank you, Ms. Manal, for letting us participate. And I respond to them that I love you, thank you for being participants. And I can’t wait to see you as adults looking at my artwork. And those are all their drawings in front of them? Yes. They kept doing drawings over and over, so I would give them one original good paper, and then I just give them white paper, because kids just love to run off and do these amazing drawings. What’s this? Another palm tree? You’re right. Yeah. There’s a lot of. I want a camel unconscious of a drawing with no story. And so I always ask them to tell me a story about their drawing. Collaboration has always been at the heart of Manal’s practise. In the early 2000s, she took photographs of female friends and colleagues in a makeshift studio at her parents house. The first jerk you made was I am. Is that right? A series of photographs. Now they’re hanging in the british museum and in other eminent collections. I mean, the first thing that draws you in is the woman’s eyes. I mean, she is just looking right at you and she wants to tell you something, but she’s holding. I don’t even know the term, what you use on a film set, a clapper, just to say what take it is with the scene and the take and the role written in arabic numerals. And she’s wearing the borka, the kind of leather covering over her face except for her eyes. So it’s a real juxtaposition of. Professionalism and this kind of Bedouin accessories or Bedouin traditions. And that’s something that runs throughout this series. Right. It’s this juxtaposition of a woman’s job and BedouIn jewellery or accessories. This picture that you just described is of Haifal Mansour, who is a very well known film direct actor who did a movie called Wajida. The striking black and white images show women confident and excited about the future, but also point to the social restrictions around women’s employment. At the time, King Abdullah al Sa’d had just signalled reforms, saying that women were allowed to work according to their nature. And that, for me, was the trigger for this sort of concept. Making this work is what is my nature and who defines it and what does it mean. And at that point, it felt to me that discussion was very philosophical. But in reality, on the ground, I was already working. All the people around me, the women were working in very interesting jobs. But truth be told, only 3% of women had jobs at that point in time. In Saudi Arabia today, there is 35% of women are working. As a huge transformation in just so many years. I spoke to Hiba d al Dean, a childhood friend of Manal’s and now one of the most senior women at the Aramco oil company, about what it was like posing for Manal 20 years ago. She gave me a steering wheel and she said, I’m going to photograph you behind the steering wheel. Is that okay? And I said, yeah, sure, why not? She knew how she wanted me to look, so I held the steering wheel and she said, think I want to drive? She wanted that to come out in my eyes. And so that was that picture with the steering wheel that became very famous. And she knows everybody’s story. She remembers that and reflects on it and synthesises it, and she makes the story from that, and it’s a superpower. Manal’s studio back in London is a trove of remnants and memories of her most famous works. My little closet, which has no lights, so only daytime exploration. So there’s a lot of packing materials because I tend to quickly pack things. I have a lot of foam in here, which I cut for my mackettes. I despied the scrolls that you used for the Guggenheim performance. Oh, yeah, these are all broken ones. I only get the bad art in my studio. A piece just fell on the floor there. Yeah, I mean, they’re so thin and so, I mean, as we know, because we got to smash them. Manal’s Guggenheim performance was titled from shattered ruins, new life shall bloom onto eggshell thin porcelain scrolls. Manal printed texts and materials from social media that showed the constraints women face, both in the Middle east and the west. Then, at one fell swoop, the audience had the chance to smash them. Manal invited me to reenact the moment. I don’t know if you can smash one right now. If I give you one of the broken ones, you will have a paranoia. I know. Let’s choose the most messed up one. But you’re right that the thrill, if I’m honest, was less in smashing these texts of the patriarchy, but just in smashing an artwork because you’re so conditioned to be so careful about it. And it really was. It just felt so wrong. I’m going to bang it with my fist. I’m going to break it with. Okay, I’m going to break it with a fist. Like breaking a twig. Yeah, you’re right. It does. And then people went on and kept breaking it everywhere. It’s very satisfying. 300 people, like, all at the same time. There was this beautiful sound of. Today. Manal continues to work with others on her projects, but oasis of stories is at a drastically different scale. She has just returned from Alula with more than a thousand drawings to incorporate into the artwork. So how does she transition from a mode of participation into solitary studio work? For me, the idea of having anybody come into my studio during this process is very, very dangerous, and a lot of people around me suffer because of this. So curators who work with me, my studio team, even my gallerists, are not allowed to come in during this sort of birthing process of an idea. I’m very deeply influenced by words, by feelings. And so I try to insulate myself in that time and create and think and write. And usually the artwork that I draw in this process is absolutely not the artwork that I end up making. But it is a safe space to start somewhere with weird things, drawings, materials that don’t work and break and look ugly, and then you set them aside, and then the real work is birthed. After that, it’s clear Manal feels a responsibility towards the people she includes. She does extensive research on a culture’s rituals so that she profoundly understands these important social elements. Sometimes you just wonder, why does the coffee cup have to be served with the right hand? And there’s a limit of three cups. And then after that, you’re imposing. And if you take less than three cups, then you have a problem with the host. So there’s a balance. Why do these traditions exist? And, yes, we love them. There’s people that are preserving them and thinking about them and writing in poetry. But for me, as an artist that looks at my community, I have a much more critical eye with a lot of questions. Her sculptures and installations draw on months of research, thinking about how to represent social norms and their critique in sculptural form. How do you know when it’s ready? Your eye has to look at it and feel comfortable looking at it. Sometimes I even hang or put sculptures inside my bedroom so that I sleep looking at them and wake up looking at them. And if I do not feel this anxiety, like, oh my God, I hate it, I can’t look, then that means it’s ready. Manal, this is such a time of change and investment and excitement in the contemporary art sphere in Saudi, and you’ve been a part of it when it was a very grassroots, small, community led art scene to this vast one of museums biennials, art fairs. Now, can you talk about how it feels to be on the wave? Definitely. What’s happening in the contemporary art scene in Saudi Arabia is an incredible moment. I worry about the next generation of artists if this kind of roller coaster mood continues. It’s very hard to develop a practise in this kind of atmosphere of everybody’s watching, everybody’s documenting on international platforms. Still, an art scene is better than no art scene. So I am in celebration today, so I don’t have to now worry about an artwork that goes into the vault of a western museum. But in my hometown, it will be the permanent artwork. And Manel Audoigan has taken up the mantle of representing her country as she prepares her work for the saudi pavilion at the forthcoming Olympics of the art world, the Venice Biennale in May. When Manal began working, there were no museums nor publicly visible art history. Her own work ended up in private collections abroad. But now she is making art that will be seen by her own country. An art market is developing. I’ve attended exhibitions in other cities. In the Middle east, most of the exhibitions are the same art crowd that attends. But in Saudi Arabia, when an art show opens, it’s incredible. Hundreds and hundreds of people come and you just want to go around the room, say, where are you from? Why are you here? I think the curiosity gives you energy and excitement. Bring it on in the studio. Manal Aldorian, saudi artist was presented by me, Melissa Grundland. The producers were Ashley Byrne, Melissa Grundland and Danielle Manning, and it was a made in Manchester production for the BBC World Service. The Global story is a brand new podcast from the BBC World Service, bringing major news stories into focus every weekday, we take a close up look at one big global news story so you can understand what’s really going on. While the global news podcast brings you all the latest world events, we drill deep into one major story, providing insights from the BBC’s worldwide network of journalists. The global story making sense of the news with smart takes and a fresh perspective. Search for the global story wherever you get your BBC podcasts.