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since I was little I have loved anAndalusian princess called Wallada bintal-Mustakfi. She was the daughter of oneof the last Umayyad Cordoban caliphs“Everin the 11th century,” says HH PrincessNauf Bendar Al Saud, as we settle down on a comfyarmchair after her photoshoot at Sotheby’s.Wallada, born in 1001, was a poet, an ideal beautyof the time – blonde, fair-skinned and blue-eyed– intelligent and cultured. She was also somewhatcontroversial, walking out in public without a hijaband wearing transparent tunics with her verses sewninto the trim. “This woman always struck a chord withme,” Nauf says, “because people thought she was therebel, the black sheep, but all she did was bring cultureand made Cordoba the centre for knowledge.”Nauf draws more than a few modern-day parallels.A Saudi Arabian princess, she is an Imperial PhDgraduate in clinical medicine with a speciality inectopic fat, a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicineand the founder of Lahd Gallery. In 2005, at the age of20, Nauf broke the royal tradition by working full timeas an employed genetic researcher at the King FaisalHospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.“I told my father: ‘I want to work as an employee,’but in my family you don’t really do that. My hourswere from 8am-6pm, I was a normal geneticresearcher, because I was an undergrad. They reallywere the best years of my life because I learned somuch and I made really true friendships.”It was through these valued friendships that theidea for Lahd Gallery as a focal point for womenartists from the Gulf came to fruition, opening inRiyadh in 2005.“I wanted to prove that Middle Eastern art wasn’tall calligraphy and camels,” Nauf, who also paints,explains. “I met a lot of like-minded people at thehospital, especially women like me who reallyenjoyed going to cultural openings, who loved art,or were artists. The problem was there was no spaceto promote their art. Even if they did, they had to gothrough a sort of clique of old-fashioned artists thatwere there from the 1950s. This was just 10 yearsago, and there were no contemporary art spaces topromote these women.”The gallery soon became a well-known exhibitionspace on the Saudi Arabian contemporary art scene,representing emerging and established artists, bothmale and female.In 2006, Nauf began to promote her artists in| 29MT Aug15 28_30 princess.indd 29 28/07/2015 11:18