Daniah Alsaleh is a Saudi artist whose artworks explore the intersections of social discourse, identity, and digital space. Her practice uses physical materials in combination with computational methodologies and aims to enable art as a critical mediator in human relationships. The multidisciplinary nature of her work is derived from her education background and exploratory practice; Alsaleh holds an undergraduate degree in computer applications from King Saud University in Riyadh (1993). She subsequently took selected courses at art academies in London, including Central Saint Martins, Slade School of Art, and The Prince’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts, and began producing art and exhibiting in 2013. In 2019 Al Saleh won the second edition of the Ithra Art Prize with an audiovisual installation titled Sawtam (2019), an audio track with pronunciations of all twenty-eight Arabic phonemes accompanied by a generative visual representation of the sounds made in speech. The artwork acted as a visual representation of women’s voices in a new era for female empowerment in Saudi Arabia. She completed an MFA with distinction in computational art at Goldsmiths, University of London (2020), and has since continued to exhibit and take part in residencies regionally and internationally.  

Her 2023 residency with the Goethe-Institut Riyadh made it possible for the artist to explore archaeological sites AlUla and Tayma alongside a Saudi-German team of archaeologists headed by the German Archaeological Institute (DAI). Encountering the archaeological finds from this region, she became interested in carnelian stone beads as objects with an embodied history and cultural significance. Carnelian beads were produced in Tayma and served as important social artifacts. These beads, once central to rituals and identity, continue to resonate in modern times, echoing the unbroken thread of human expression. Bridging the ancient and the contemporary, she reflects on the role of these beads and their ongoing usage in a series of mixed-media artworks conceived as abstractions of the archaeological sites. Using sketches, photo transfer, oil paint, and carnelian powder, the works use the materiality of these sites to offer a view of history—and continuity.