Sharjah Art Foundation hosts Afra Al Dhaheri’s first institutional solo show
- Last updated: September 7, 2025 | 10:45
Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer
Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) has opened its autumn 2025 programme with Restless Circle, Abu Dhabi-based artist Afra Al Dhaheri’s first institutional solo exhibition. On view in Gallery 6, Al Mureijah Square, SAF spaces, Sharjah, from August 30 to December 14, the exhibition explores the structural effects of tension, repetition and time.
Working with materials such as cotton rope, fabric, cement and hair, Al Dhaheri emphasises slow gestures, intentional movements and the fatigue that can arise from continuous, 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 itself be a form of making.
Place is a feature of 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 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 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 of its production: the strain of bringing the elements together, the effort of holding them in unison and finally, 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 creation, 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 draw 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 outside the subject’s control — offers a metaphor for mental exhaustion and collective burnout, a sense of being endlessly pushed to produce or perform.
Through Al Dhaheri’s observant manipulations, the exhibition Restless Circle draws 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. Restless Circle is curated by May Alqaydi, SAF Assistant Curator. Al Dhaheri’s work is rooted in her experiences growing up in Abu Dhabi and the wider UAE — a place of recent and rapid change. Working across various mediums including mixed media, sculpture, drawing, painting, installation, photography, and printmaking, she draws out notions of time and adaptation, rigour and fragility.
Each experiment heralds a new phase, and each new phenomenon or its actualisation, is pulled out from her unique vocabulary of references – in her practice, repetition acts as a method for prolonging time as much as being a tool through which to truly experience or realise each stage of a work. Born in 1988 in Abu Dhabi, Al Dhaheri obtained her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, USA, in 2017 and had her residencies from the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship, in partnership with the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014; Porthmeor Studios, St. Ives, Cornwall, UK (2019); Viafarini, Milan (2022); and The Watermill Center, NY (2023). She was among the finalists for the Richard Mille Art Prize 2022. Al Dhaheri is the creator and artistic lead for the project Collective Exhaustion (2024), supported by the National Grant for Culture and Creativity, UAE Ministry of Culture and Youth.
Solo exhibitions include Split Ends, Green Art Gallery, Dubai, UAE (2021) and Inevitable Ephemera, T + H Gallery, Boston, USA (2016). Selected group exhibitions include Beyond: Emerging Artists, Cromwell Place, London, UK (2021); Conscious Becoming, Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, Belgium (2021); Beyond: Emerging Artist, Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi (2020); From Within, Riyadh, KSA (2019); Avoid Bad Dreams, Green Art Gallery, Dubai (2019); Barcelona to Abu Dhabi, Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi (2018); and Emirati Expressions, Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi (2011 and 2015).
SAF is an advocate, catalyst and producer of contemporary art in the emirate of Sharjah and the surrounding region, in dialogue with the international arts community. The Foundation advances an experimental and wide-ranging programmatic model that supports the production and presentation of contemporary art, preserves and celebrates the distinct culture of the region and encourages a shared understanding of the transformational role of art.
SAF’s core initiatives include the long-running Sharjah Biennial, featuring contemporary artists from around the world; the annual March Meeting, a convening of international arts professionals and artists; grants and residencies for artists, curators and cultural producers; ambitious and experimental commissions and a range of travelling exhibitions and scholarly publications.