Mashael AlSaie: Resurrecting Bahraini mythology through ecofeminist art

Mashael AlSaie’s art invites us to consider the topographies—both physical and ideological—that shape our existence. Born in Bahrain and now based in Riyadh, AlSaie’s work dives deep into mythologies and collective memories, chronicling and appreciating the underexplored legends and stories from her homeland. Simultaneously, her practice takes a look at the fragile, often tense, relationship between humans and the environment, particularly as it pertains to the female body. The artist was recently signed with Hunna Art, a gallery known for championing women artists from the Arab peninsula. 

“At first, photography and making art served as a revolt against impermanence,” AlSaie tells Dazed MENA, speaking about what propelled her into the realm of art. AlSaie’s practice incorporates photography, sculpture, text, and glass—media she uses to dissect the interplay between myth and reality.  “But then the camera grew as a reverse phantom limb; a way I could further discern what I did not have words to articulate.”

With a background as varied as the themes she traverses, AlSaie has lived and worked in cities across the globe—from Bahrain to New York to the UAE, and now Saudi Arabia. But her creative core remains anchored in the mythologies of her birthplace. Her most recent body of work probes collective consciousness embedded in the myth of the Ain Adhari, a natural spring in Bahrain. The story of Ain Adhari is one of resilience, loss, and transformation. According to folklore, Adhari was a maiden who, in the face of graceful suffering, wept until her body transformed into an eternal spring. This mythical morphing, potently melancholic, speaks to the capacity of nature and the female body to endure and adapt through the dregs of trauma and grief. 

“My work is largely inspired by local myth and storytelling,” she tells Dazed. “I juxtapose that against photography and research of the land. I’m primarily interested in the ways in which water-lores have embedded our worldview.”

And what a wealth of myth has spurted from the human connection to bodies of water through time. In her work, AlSaie resurrects the Ain Adhari myth and applies it to modern-day environmental and cultural crises. For her, the myth reflects our current climate situation, where springs are drying up entirely, and the cultural and historical connections they represent dissipate in their wake. Her work layers the spirituality of the story with a critical look at the stark reality of environmental degradation, giving it an undeniable depth and urgency.

In her study of ecofeminism, AlSaie interrogates the limits placed on women’s bodies and how these restrictions often resemble the exploitation of land. This is where the tension in her work lies: the ways in which both land and body are both sites of reverence and violence, creativity and destruction. This connection is especially apparent in her series ‘The Insatiable Desire to be Submerged,’ where a female figure submerged in water becomes a symbol for the liminal spaces in myth, memory, and uncertainty surrounding the environment. 

In wielding her camera, AlSaie shifts from being inspired by myths to becoming a mythopoetic herself. She uses photography as a vessel for the stories that lie under the veneer of the visible world. Her use of multiple exposures, as seen in ‘The Insatiable Desire to be Submerged,’ creates a sense of fluidity, capturing the Adhari Maiden’s metamorphosis into water. The blurred figure in the image is less a person and more a symbol of flux; an entity caught between the corporeal and the ethereal. 

In October, AlSaie did her first solo exhibition Gentle Porosities in Kuwait, under the banner of Hunna’s first permanent gallery space. The exhibition reimagined the landscape as a site of vulnerability and resistance, the work grappling with the land and the female body—two entities often subjected to control and commodification under patriarchal authoritarianism. Through photography, sculpture, sound, and glass, AlSaie created a dialogue between the organic and the artificial, framing land as a living, breathing entity rather than a resource to be exploited. 

Some of the works were glass sculptures infused with frankincense, emphasising the fragility of these themes. Glass tears—delicate, translucent, perilously shatterable—represent the fragility of the earth and the human spirit. The series is poetic and political, a physical commentary on inherited traumas and the precariousness of our natural world. While the work is steeped in themes of loss and fragility, there is also a distinct energy of resilience throughout. For the artist, ecofeminism is not just about critiquing the exploitation of the land and the female body, but about reimagining more sustainable relationships with both. In this way, her art is a form of reclamation, an effort to repair the relationship with the body and the land in ways that are not extractive but healing. 

“My creative process is fuelled by curiosity, archival research, and a childish sense of play,” AlSaie shares with Dazed MENA. For such grave subject matter, her art manages to trap and exhibit her sense of wonder with what she is exploring; it radiates through every medium she deploys. 

AlSaie’s art is critically intersectional—grounded in all the beauty that her two realms of interest intrinsically hold. It possesses all the layers, complexity, and power of her chosen subjects, her art stirring one to reconcile their connection to them. Her work mourns the loss of empathy for the earth, but also seeks to reignite a mythological consciousness that could help us heal that relationship. At the heart of it all is a desire for us to reconnect—to land, to memory, to the stories that shape us.