Saudi Arabian artist Maha Malluh’s, Do You Want to Be Happy, from her collection Food for Thought, 2012, is a conceptual artwork that foregrounds the symbolism of daily life objects that are connected to Saudi communal and collective identity. Malluh’s work within this collection primarily uses found everyday objects, which she gets from local flea markets and junk shops. In this piece, Malluh has stacked a collection of cassette tapes, recordings of hardline instructional religious sermons targeting women, on a wooden tray that was used by old bakeries. 

As the artist notes, this artwork “speaks to how social transformation has occurred as a result of the widespread distribution of certain cassettes, promoting a whole new paradigm of thought and a different way of life.” These recordings had a large role to play in shifting the perceptions and perspectives of an entire population. It delineated the ways in which women had to behave, think, and exist in order to be considered virtuous. Instead of eating bread, the most filling and basic food item, the people fed themselves, ‘nurtured’ their souls, through a steady diet of rigid religious sermons. 

By collecting and displaying these cassette tapes within the bread wooden board, Malluh’s work is a commentary on the importance of not forgetting the past and what had shaped its contours. It aims at preserving the memory of these throwaway objects in relation to each other, as they were both a by-product of the same era. By doing so, the piece is critically addressing the nation’s rigid cultural history in order to acknowledge it, integrate it, and move past it. More broadly, this work highlights the ways in which ideas generated by religious systems of control can easily spread across a society and become ingrained within it. However, if so, it is also suggesting that other, different ideas can also penetrate assumed closed boundaries, and in the process, enact another paradigm shift.


stamped on reverse "Maha Malluh 2012"