The artist’s first institutional solo exhibition explores tension, repetition and the quiet weight of time.
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, the exhibition showcases key works that explore the structural effects of tension, repetition, and time.
Working with materials such as cotton rope, fabric, cement, and hair, Al Dhaheri highlights slow gestures, deliberate movements, and the fatigue that emerges from ongoing, repetitive, and often invisible labour. Time is not a backdrop but an active force in her work. It bends, drifts, loops and circles back, creating a fragile balance between continuity and rupture.
In early works, such as In absence we forgot (2015) and To Revisit (2016), the artist experiments with casting, layering, and erasure to consider what remains when material forms begin to fade. Later works, such as Conditioning the Knot (2022) and To Detangle (2020), draw attention to the act of undoing, suggesting that dismantling can be a form of making in its own right.
Place also shapes the artist’s practice. The series Hide and Sew (2020) reflects on domestic life in the Gulf, focusing on themes of privacy and protection. In Spiral Staircase (2020), a triptych of acrylic and graphite drawings, Al Dhaheri turns to an architectural feature once common in Abu Dhabi: spiral staircases attached to the exterior of buildings. The work maps not only architectural change but also the lived routines formed around such structures.
Her most recent works deepen her investigation into time, repetition and gesture. Round and Round We Go (2023) features cotton rope coiled around five wooden rings, studded almost relentlessly with bobby pins. Pull, Tie, Release (2024) features knotted ropes stretched across a wooden frame, its title echoing the choreography of its creation: the strain, the hold, and the letting go.
Two new commissions debut in this exhibition. For I craved a garden, it emerged in the folds (2025) introduces a mobile structure that can be revisited and reconfigured in different contexts, embracing a slower and more intuitive mode of making. The title work, Restless Circle (2025), takes inspiration from desert plants that carve spiral patterns in the sand as they move with the wind. For Al Dhaheri, this restless motion, without a clear destination and shaped by forces beyond control, becomes a metaphor for mental exhaustion and collective burnout.
Through quiet manipulations of form and material, Restless Circle reflects on what remains when things come undone, on the knowledge that emerges from repetition, and on the exhaustion that builds in cycles of labour. It asks what might be revealed when we linger with what is quiet, invisible and unresolved.
May Alqaydi, Assistant Curator at Sharjah Art Foundation, curates the exhibition. The exhibition opens on August 30 and runs until December 14, 2025. For more information, please visit the Sharjah Art Foundation.
