Shadia Alem (Arabic: شادية عالم, romanized: Shādiyah 'Ālim; born in Mecca) is a Saudi Arabian visual artist. She is known for her sculpture, installation art, and painting. She lives and works between Paris and Jeddah.^[1]

Shadia Alem was born in Makkah.^[2] Her childhood was spent in Taif, where she reportedly painted on doors from a young age.^[3] Her father was a calligrapher and her mother embroidered.^[4]

Alem graduated with a BA in Art and English Literature from King Abdulaziz University. ^[5]

Since 1985 Alem's work has been exhibited nationally in Saudi Arabia and internationally.^[2] Some works are a commentary of the lives of women in Saudi Arabia, using form to demonstrate the anxiety that women may live under.^[6]

Alem's work, Youm al-Suq, was selected by British Airways to appear on the livery of its aircraft in 1998.^[7][8] Her 2007 retrospective exhibition at Albareh Gallery demonstrated the development of her work from portraiture, to landscape, to photography.^[9] She has also exhibited at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn,^[10] at Amum in Tennessee,^[11] in Istanbul as part of its 2010 Capital of Culture programme,^[12] and at the 6th Berlin Biennale.^[13]

In 2011, Saudi Arabia entered the Venice Biennale for the first time with Alem as the country's representative.^[14][15][16] Her work, entitled The Black Arch, which draws on folklore, Islam and medieval travel narratives.^[17] The work was made of up of a dark cube suspended on its point over a sea of iridescent spheres.^[18] Visitors were encouraged to move around the work and the sphere represented travellers of all kinds.^[19] It covered an area of 350 square metres; its scale as an installation has been interpreted as a challenge to spatial order.^[20] The colour black was also key to the installation: as the colour of Ka'aba cloth, the colour of the silhouettes of veiled women and of the black stone.^[4]

In the same year, Alem was one of the artists chosen to feature in the British Museum's exhibition Hajj.^[21][22] However, 2011 was not just a year of achievement - it is also the year their mother died, 15 years worth of work was lost in a flood in Jeddah and computer failure lost five further projects.^[4]

In 2011, Shadia Alem and her sister, writer, were featured in Vogue Italia, discussing their work and the role of women in Saudi Arabia.^[23] While Alem tackles gender issues through her work, her sister sees her writing as genderless.^[24] In Alem's work Negative No More, the pre-and-misconceptions of Saudi women are commented on.^[25] This installation consisted of 5000 photographic negatives, none of which feature women, to draw attention to the fact that women have been absent from Saudi Arabian political history.^[26]