AFRA AL DHAHERI
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Born in 1988 in Abu Dhabi, UAE, Afra Al Dhaheri obtained her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, Rhode Island in 2017. She had residencies at The Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship, in partnership with the Rhode Island School of Design (2014); Porthmeor Studios, St. Ives, Cornwall, UK (2019); Viafarini, Milan (2022); and The Watermill Center, NY (2023). She was among the finalists for the Richard Mille Art Prize 2022.
Al Dhaheri’s work is rooted in her experiences growing up in Abu Dhabi and the wider UAE, a place of recent and rapid change. Working across various mediums, including mixed media, sculpture, drawing, painting, installation, photography and printmaking, she draws out notions of time and adaptation, rigor and fragility.
Al Daheri has had solo and group exhibitions across the globe, including shows in Dubai, Lisbon, Paris, New York, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, London, and Belgium. Al Daheri also has notable public commissioned works to her credit, including ‘Union of Artists’, commissioned by Dubai Culture in collaboration with Art Dubai (2024); and ‘Pillow Fort Playground’, Public Art Programme, Expo 2020, Dubai, UAE (2021).
About The Work
Courtesy Green Art Gallery, Dubai
I will be producing works that are infused by my previous research and responding to a text by Byung-Chul Han from “The Scent of Time”: “Dyschronicity lets time whizz, so to speak. The feeling that life is accelerating is really the experience of time that is whizzing without a direction.”
The earth pulls us down to ground us. Grounding means slowing down and observing, becoming conscious of our surroundings, and absorbing and processing. A yearning that lingers in the shadows of scattered minds.
The metamorphosis of hair has been a ritual within my practice. My mother once told me: “Take your fallen hair and bury it in the soil of your house plant. They will nourish it.” The poetry of the gesture stayed with me and made me think of the ways in which our bodies return to the earth to nurture it. Could grounding ourselves be another manifestation of that return, a way to access nurturing?
I ground myself in the process of making work, constantly deconstructing and reconstructing elements of the material and concept. I often develop a visual vocabulary to engage the audience only to unlearn it to find a new language. I seek meaning within the medium. I ground myself, here, in the process.