Sarah Almehairi
The cycle of “re-”
Subtle Shifts
Subtle Sameness
Structural Sameness
Structural Shift
Structural Subtleness
Subtle Sameness
I step into a landscape of multiples. There is no such thing as a single, as it always is a reinvention of another.
Repositioned.
Reoriented.
Recreated.
Through the act of repetition, meaning is inherently regenerated. Reproducibility has no end, but is there a beginning?
Fluctuating between image and poetry, narrative and abstract, I explore ideas of place through replicated objects. These objects suggest a form other than its original -- a map, fictionalized evidence, a sentence. As the object moves from one medium to another, one dimension to another, how does it cross thresholds? Does it morph and create its own? Are there boundaries to dimensionality?
These objects create landscapes of the multiple, environments and settings of their own kind. Through symmetry and form, information is collected and organized. Forced relationships unfold obscuring the absurdity. Asymmetry appears and suggests another type of linearity. Through this, order is imposed, allowing language to assert structure.
These landscapes readapt memories, reverse interior and exterior, re-place, re-place, re-place.
It is a container for negative space. Negative that occupies space and has more presence than me and you combined.
Sarah Almehairi’s artifacts have the air of eroded replicas. Stripped from their signifiers, it’s not obvious that all 40 casts are original molds – from a projector’s Styrofoam container. In Almehairi’s play on copies as originals – arranged in multiples like flat-pack furniture – a kind of futuristic domesticity arises. A Filled Form is Familiar has modular logic. In architectural exercises, Almehairi finds containment in unenclosed space, putting modules together and taking them apart differently each time. These are forced relationships, her language of forms implies. She moves away from the grid to create a new compartmentalized vocabulary, a repositioning.
Fragments of a sentence develop in a landscape of conglomerates. Although text and object do not occupy the same space, they coexist. Language becomes a framing device for the sequencing of forms, a puzzle of connections between components. Relinquishing complete control, her compositions aren’t pre-planned but arranged and rearranged on-site, where negative space becomes an organizing principle.
The viewer might question what is being unpacked but as verticality is restrained and there’s no hierarchy, the process is intuitive. It’s a piecing together of what happens when you look at the interior as the exterior, when change recurs, when all pattern is foregone, when emptiness becomes full.
Sarah Almehairi was born in Abu Dhabi in 1998, where she currently lives and works. She received her BA in Art and Art History from New York University of Abu Dhabi (UAE). Almehairi’s overarching body of work unfolds a discourse on language, form and memory through the intuitive examination of narrative and abstraction. By engaging with shape and structure, she extracts and defines a visual language while simultaneously exploring the push and pull of material to evoke a story that both conceals and reveals.
She has participated in various group exhibitions, including Intimate Dimensions, Hafez Gallery, Jeddah, (2020), The Youth Takeover, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, (2019), and her first solo show, Between, was hosted by Carbon 12 Gallery, Dubai, (2019). Almehairi is also the creator of the Zoom Artist Talks series and co-founder of JARA Collective.