Today's Edition
SARA ALZAABI (ABU DHABI)
Amid Abu Dhabi's rapid rise as one of the world's top cities, artist Afra Al Dhaheri offers a reminder in her latest work for the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial: Slow down.
Organised by the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi (DCT Abu Dhabi), the biennial runs until April 30, exploring the evolving concept of "public" in the city and examining how public spaces - influenced by the environment, architecture, and community life - shape Abu Dhabi's identity.
Through an experience made of wooden structures, tangled ropes, subtle lighting, and layered sound, Al Dhaheri's installation becomes a quiet space-a sanctuary from the overstimulation of modern life.
Titled "D-constructing Collective Exhaustion (2024)", it is a call to reconnect with the body and mind - to feel, breathe, and remember.
"Adapting to change is basically a theme that I have been working with. I reflect on how we adapt to this rapid change that we are enduring inevitably. And one of the solutions was to try and attempt slowing down time," Al Dhaheri told Aletihad.
She observed how in today's fast-paced environment, we often lose touch with the present: "Our span of memory is affected, we do not remember things clearly when they are close in time. Instead, our memories become clearer from when we were younger. And now, our memory has shifted from the brain to the phone."
Through long, laborious creative processes, Al Dhaheri tries to stretch time, giving space for moments to settle and resonate.
In this piece, repetition plays a central role. The artist and her team spent two months untwisting commercially processed rope, taking it back to its raw, wool-like form.
"It does not require thinking, but it requires doing. And in doing in this repetitive manner, you can question or imagine this process. Repetition is a very important part of our culture, religion. There is persistence in it, there is calmness, like when you get a panic attack and they ask you to regulate your breathing," she said.
Repetition, for her, is also a way to revisit simpler gestures of life. It is not just about making art - it's about reawakening presence.
Urbanisation and its impact on identity are central undercurrents in her thought process, Al Dhaheri said.
"It is inevitable, we are witnessing it. We are living in a time where change is happening so rapidly. When urban development happens, it functions like a timeline; a visual record of how quickly the landscape is evolving," she said.
Time and Fragility
Speaking to Aletihad about the way she works with materials to express time and fragility, Al Dhaheri shared: "I think materials hold meaning. Every material we see that I use, myself or the audience might have their own personal association to it … So, it opens interpretation for people to exist within time and explore these interpretations."
She added: "The time spent producing the work or exhausting the material becomes a time of making and a time of breaking down meaning and understanding."
As for why she chooses specific materials, Al Dhaheri's process is often driven by curiosity.
"Sometimes the mediums choose me, I don't choose them. It takes a bit of learning and experimentation to understand what else can I do with this material," she said.
She recalled how working with concrete, rope, or plaster led to new insights about their strength, fragility, and symbolic power.
"I started working with rope as a representation for hair because it behaves similarly. But then, hair carries a lot of meaning - it can relate to privacy, religion, cultural norms. Out of this one material, you can have all these different meanings."
Ultimately, Al Dhaheri hopes her work offers something lasting - not just for now, but for the future.
"My work sometimes will be accessed a certain way nowadays. But I do think that it holds a lot of meaning for the future. I always imagine historians in the future looking back, and wonder how this work can be a look back for them to understand that there were attempts to slow down, to think differently, to engage both body and mind-and not just the eyes."
