Aperture is pleased to offer a second and very special edition from artist Jowhara AlSaud. AlSaud's work has recently been seen in several group exhibitions including the Edge of Arabia show at the 2010 Berlin Biennial.

Ten/Ten is another work from her Out of Line series. As the artist states: "This body of work began as an exploration of censorship in Saudi Arabia and it's effects on visual communication. While there is a lack of consistency from region to region, overall, images are highly scrutinized and controlled. Some superficial examples of this would be skirts lengthened and sleeves crudely added with black markers in magazines or blurred out faces on billboards.

I tried to apply the language of the censors to my personal photographs. I began making line drawings, omitting faces and skin. Keeping only the essentials preserved the anonymity of my subjects. This allowed me to circumvent, and comment on, some of the cultural taboos associated with photography. Namely the stigma attached to bringing the 'personal portrait', commonly reserved for the private domestic space, into a public sphere.

It became a game of how much can you tell with how little. When reduced to sketches, the images achieved enough distance from the original photographs that neither subjects nor censors could find them objectionable. For me, they became autonomous, relatable, pared down narratives. I've always been interested in how photography functions, and I try to undermine any documentary authority it may possess as a medium. I've always felt that a photograph functions more like a memory, in that it's a singular perspective of a split second in time, entirely subjective and hence impressionable. By etching these drawings back into film and printing them in a traditional darkroom, I'm trying to point out how malleable it is as a medium, even before digital manipulation became so advanced and accessible. With these interventions emerges a highly coded and self-reflexive language. What also interests me is that the information omitted (faces, skin and emulsion) creates an image of its own, as do the censors to our cultural landscape."

Jowhara AlSaud was born in Saudi Arabia in 1978 and now splits her time between New York and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. As an undergraduate, she studied film theory at Wellesley College and she received her Master of Fine Arts in 2004 from the School of The Museum of Fine Arts , Boston. AlSaud was runner-up for the 2008 Aperture Foundation Portfolio Prize. She has exhibited her work internationally in group and solo shows, most recently at art fairs Paris Photo, Art Palm Beach, the Aleppo 10th International Photo Festival in Syria, Scope NYC, Pulse NYC, Art Dubai, Schneider Gallery in Chicago and the Witzenhausen Gallery in Amsterdam and New York . Some of her upcoming exhibitions include solo shows in Kuwait and Amsterdam as well as group shows at the Berlin and Shanghai Biennales. Her work is part of collections across Europe, the US and the Middle East.