Afra Al Dhaheri, To Preserve (no. 2), 2017, Private collection. Courtesy of the artist and Olivier Georges Mestelan. Image Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Shanavas Jamaluddin.
Sharjah Art Foundation opens 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, Sharjah, from 30 August to 14 December, 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 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.
To book your tickets, visit sharjahart.org.
Sharjah Art Foundation is an advocate, catalyst and producer of contemporary art within 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. The Foundation’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.
Sharjah is the third largest of the seven United Arab Emirates, and the only one bridging the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Reflecting the deep commitment to the arts, architectural preservation and cultural education embraced by its ruler, Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Mohammad Al Qasimi, Sharjah is home to more than 20 museums and has long been known as the cultural hub of the United Arab Emirates. It was named UNESCO's Arab Capital of Culture for 1998 and the UNESCO World Book Capital for 2019.
Alyazeyah Al Marri
alyazeyah@sharjahart.org
+971 (0)6 5444113
Afra Al Dhaheri, To Preserve (no. 2), 2017, Private collection. Courtesy of the artist and Olivier Georges Mestelan. Image Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Shanavas Jamaluddin.