Flower Power with Noura Bint Saidan

Riyadh got a new entertainment and arts zone last year, Riyadh Boulevard City, and with it a new landmark: a joyous mural of an enigmatically smiling girl whose hair erupts in living blooms of purple flowers. If you haven’t seen it yet, check your Instas – it’ll be there.

Its creator is Saudi street-art pioneer Noura bint Saidan, and although she produced
16 other murals for the zone, the girl and her fuchsia locks is the one visitors snap time and again. “When people take a picture of it, they’re checking in – ‘This means we’re in Boulevard!’,” she says.

Fittingly for someone who makes walls her canvas, Bint Saidan’s family is in real estate but the creativity in her was never going to take to the business. “I didn’t find myself there,” she says. “Also, I don’t like numbers. I like to be free. As a kid, when I was painting I felt like I was different. Art was the only thing I knew how to excel in and be creative with. I wasn’t so good with school, but in art class, I was the best; I felt people’s reactions to me change once they’d seen my work. That was when I felt I had a relationship with art.”

Today that relationship is played out in wow-scaled works here in the kingdom and as far afield as London and Barcelona, often painted in front of impromptu audiences.

And although she’s been working to bring colour to Riyadh’s streets since 2010, creating her kind of public art is about more than simply beautifying the city – it’s also about representing her home. “Because I’m a Saudi artist I have a responsibility to reflect our culture in a modern way,” she says. “When I painted at 2019’s MDLBeast, I asked visitors from the UK and the US what they were looking for here. One said, ‘When I’m in Saudi Arabia, I want to see work that tells us about your art, your culture, your troubles, your traditional clothes as women. We need to know about you more.’”

One of those pieces featured a dancing woman wearing a dress with patterns Noura Bint Saidan discovered inside houses in one of Riyadh’s oldest neighbourhoods. While other artists interpreted the dance-focused brief in purely contemporary style, her embroidery and Arabic calligraphy related to traditional dance bridged not just ancient and modern, but global cultures too. “In art there is a sound,” she says. “It’s an international language, that everyone can understand; there’s no need to translate it. When I travel outside of Saudi Arabia, it’s important to do something related to my culture. I’m a messenger of my country as an artist.”

So does that mean Noura Bint Saidan is now an art-world ambassador, or does she still feel rooted in street art’s rough-edged accessibility? In fact, she’s not sure the line between sable brush and spray can is so clear-cut – rather she’s driven by the reach graffiti can offer. “I began working in oils and I still do,” she says. “But with a lot of painting, people have to go to a gallery to see it. There could be 200 people in the space, but still, my target is everyone: old people, kids, Saudi and non-Saudi, tourists.”

Like the Riyadh Season murals or her 3D mapped graffiti for MDLBeast, Noura Bint Saidan’s ambition is on the grand scale and she may finally have found a project to match. Neom, the city being built from scratch, features her among the young creatives in its IAmTheChange campaign. “They picked influential people involved in changing things in their field,” she says. “One of my team is a businesswoman, another an Olympic boxing silver medalist.”

Now Neom has offered the kind of site she’s been thinking about for years. “I was asked to create work for the tunnel walls, which is a graffiti artist’s dream. I ended up doing two tunnels, in fact!” And Noura Bint Saidan won’t be stopping there. “I’ve done a lot of works outside,” she says. “But I want to do something more formal, with all the proper permissions, because Noura two years ago is not Noura now. Today I’m thinking about how to make my art bigger.”
instagram.com/nourabinsaidan.

2 cool exhibitions in Riyadh

Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale
There’s still time to check out this landmark art festival, which brings together 70 artists who are responding to the theme “feeling the stones”. Check out Saudi artists, from Sarah Brahim to Omar Abduljawad. Click here for more information.
To March 11, JAX District, Al Diriyah, biennialfoundation.org.

Under Construction
Covering the theme of identity being under construction, this exhibition presented by Misk Art Institute looks past Western fantasies about the Arab region. Bringing together ten artists, it covers a range of forms including documentary and traditional symbols.
To Feb 24. Prince Faisal bin Fahd Arts Hall, mistartinstitute.org