2 days ago
Afra Al Dhaheri's 1st institutional solo exhibition opens at SAF
Working with materials such as cotton rope, fabric, cement and hair, Al Dhaheri emphasises slow gestures, intentional movements and the fatigue that can build from ongoing, repetitive and even invisible labour. Time weaves itself into the artworks as it bends, drifts, loops and circles back, striking a delicate balance between continuity and rupture.
In works such as In absence we forgot (2015) and To Revisit (2016), Al Dhaheri uses techniques like casting, layering and erasure to investigate what remains when material forms begin to fade. With the later works Conditioning the Knot(2022) and To Detangle (2020), she draws attention to the labour of repetitive dismantling, showing that to undo something may be a form of making in itself.
Place factors into the artist's works as well. The series 'Hide and Sew' (2020) reflects on themes of privacy and protection shaped by domestic life in the Gulf. Al Dhaheri also navigates the threshold between public and private spaces in Spiral Staircase (2020), a triptych of acrylic and graphite drawings documenting an architectural feature once common in Abu Dhabi: spiral staircases on the outside of buildings. The work traces not only the rapid architectural shifts but also the lived routines formed around such structures.
The artist's most recent works continue the emphasis on time, considering how repeated gestures can bend, stretch or even disrupt our experience of each passing moment. In Round and Round We Go (2023), cotton rope is coiled around five wooden rings, with bobby pins clipped into the structure almost relentlessly. In Pull, Tie, Release (2024), knotted ropes are stretched across a wooden frame. The title reads like a set of instructions, pointing to the choreography ofits production: the strain, the hold and the letting go.
The exhibition features two new commissions. For I craved a garden, it emerged in the folds (2025), the artist shifts toward a slower, more intuitive mode of making by proposing a mobile structure that can be returned to in multiple settings. The second commission, Restless Circle (2025), draws inspiration from desert plants that etch spiral patterns in the sand as they move with the wind. For the artist, the constant motion—not moving towards a clear destination but simply responding to forces beyond its control—offers a metaphor for mental exhaustion and collective burnout, the sense of being endlessly pushed to produce or perform.
Through Al Dhaheri's subtle manipulations, the exhibition Restless Circle draws our attention to the remains of what was once held together, the knowledge that forms through the process of undoing and the exhaustion that accumulates over the course of repeated tasks. What happens when we stay a while with what is quiet, invisible and unresolved?
Restless Circle is curated by May Alqaydi, Assistant Curator, Sharjah Art Foundation.
