Sharjah Art Foundation inaugurates its autumn 2025 programme with Restless Circle, the first institutional solo exhibition by Abu Dhabi-based artist Afra Al Dhaheri curated by May Alqaydi. On view from 30 August until 14 December at Gallery 6, Al Mureijah Square, the exhibition traces the structural effects of tension, repetition and time across two decades of practice.
Working with materials such as cotton rope, fabric, cement and hair, Al Dhaheri highlights gestures that are at once slow and deliberate yet marked by fatigue. Time becomes tangible in her work, bending, drifting, looping, and circling back, while the acts of knotting, binding, unravelling and re-making embody the physical and mental labour of repetition.
Earlier works including In Absence We Forgot (2015) and To Revisit (2016) explore what lingers when forms begin to fade, while To Detangle (2020) and Conditioning the Knot (2022) reveal the generative potential of undoing. Place surfaces in pieces such as Spiral Staircase (2020), which documents now-familiar architectural features of Abu Dhabi, and Hide and Sew (2020), which reflects on domesticity, privacy and protection.
Recent works such as Round and Round We Go (2023) and Pull, Tie, Release (2024) underscore how repeated gestures accumulate strain, yet also produce rhythm and quiet knowledge. For Restless Circle, Al Dhaheri presents two new commissions: I craved a garden, it emerged in the folds (2025), a mobile structure that invites return and renewal, and Restless Circle (2025), inspired by desert plants that trace spirals in the sand, embodying exhaustion without arrival.
Brought together in a single space, Al Dhaheri’s works ask what can be learned from what is fragile, undone and in perpetual motion.
Location: Sharjah Art Foundation, Gallery 6, Al Mureijah Square.
Date: 30 August until 14 December.
About Afra Al Dhaheri
Afra Al Dhaheri (b. 1988, Abu Dhabi, UAE) works across mixed media, sculpture, drawing, painting, installation, photography and printmaking. Inspired by her experience growing up in a rapidly changing Abu Dhabi, her practice explores time, adaptation, fragility and endurance. Repetition often functions as both a method of extending time and a process of fully realising each stage of a work. Al Dhaheri holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2017) and has undertaken residencies in Abu Dhabi and the UK. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions internationally since 2011.