Sara Ahli

My work is an examination

of an exploration

of an experimentation

of embodied experiences.

To understand a body, we must exhaust it to its full potential. This is a documented extension of my physical body:

  1. Stage the bodies into situations
  2. Apply a force ever so slightly to ensure no rupture occurs
  3. Perhaps bag them in a vacuum bag, or multiple bags.
  4. Bagging one body into another. From one layer of skin to the other.
  5. A stacking of layers; epidermis, an intertwining of organs
  6. Perhaps use two bricks and a clamp
  7. Press it up against your chest, hug it intimately
  8. Any forced gesture, with intent.
  9. Watch the bodies begin to adjust, leaning into one another.
  10. A performance, just for your eyes.
  11. From a fragment to a whole, a unit.
  12. From discomfort to comfort
  13. Stuck in a state of being or unexpectedly a sense of discovery and liberation.

20201112-seaf-exhibition-145-5fae3c8606bfa.jpg (Events Big)

Sara Ahli’s installation reveals her exhaustive experiments with organ-like forms. A sense of broken physicality manifests in the restrictive environments Ahli stages – such as with the centerpiece of tangled balloons concealed in vacuum bags after the air is sucked out of them. Appearing as abdominal viscera, there is an unusually non-violent, muted quality to the work. A question arises: Does a form of dwelling exist inside the body and its entrails?

Ahli is interrogating how different bodies can be contained in the physical world. A stack of balloons filled with plaster bears the effects of a readjustment – as does her memory foam sculpture inscribed with a belly button cavity that will disappear, How long can I stay imprinted in your memory? As materials perform and yield to compression in these trials, before returning to their original shape, somatic memory is probed and imposed gestures are undone.

Approximating organs and skin, Ahli’s anthropomorphic works are inflated, clamped, decompressed and filled. Her performative interventions leave extensions of her body – the invisible material at work – behind (such as the precast fragment of her fingers). In these experiences of embodying a disembodiment, Ahli creates new spatial relationships and transforms the inanimate into the corporeal.

Sara Ahli (b. 1993) is an artist and designer living and working in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Ahli received her BFA at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco in 2015. Her work explores feelings of discomfort and pressure while also incorporating a sense of play and humor. Her staged situations reference the body in different exhaustive states, testing the material's limitations  in the space in which it exists.

Ahli’s senior thesis collection was featured on the front cover of California Apparel News. She was a finalist in the Royal Society of Arts US, and is the founder of her own menswear fashion brand, X-Labeled.