Gravity and Lightness: Afra Al Dhaheri

Sharjah Art Foundation presents Restless Circle, the first institutional solo exhibition of Afra Al Dhaheri, in which the Emirati artist reflects on the relationship between time, repetition, and tension through materials such as cotton rope, fabric, concrete, and hair. The works on display include sculptures, installations, and works on paper, built around slow, repetitive gestures, deliberate movements, and cycles of labor that reveal a subjectivity marked by fatigue. Repetition becomes a performative act, and the accumulated materials serve as tangible traces of an invisible, everyday, often feminine process. Born in Abu Dhabi in 1988 and a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design in 2017, Afra Al Dhaheri develops a multidisciplinary artistic practice that spans installation, painting, printmaking, and drawing. Her work reflects a delicate balance between fragility and resilience, evoking connections between body and space, memory and construction, intimacy and discipline. Restless Circle offers a reflection on contemporary subjectivity and on those silent forms of tension that accumulate over time and space. The selected materials evoke the relationship between gravity and lightness, gesture and trace, revealing a dense poetic language rooted in the rhythms of the everyday. While specific details on the individual works exhibited have yet to be released, the show emerges as an opportunity to discover one of the most compelling voices in the contemporary Emirati art scene, capable of combining conceptual rigor with material sensitivity.