Stir World

Grey cement blocks lie in circles of sand, placed across a gallery space.  Piano wires ‘grow’ out of the blocks, giving them a plantlike appearance. The wires rotate, touching the sand and etching circular, repetitive patterns into it, echoing spirals left in the desert by plants moving with the wind. This is Restless Circle (2025), an artwork by Abu Dhabi-based artist Afra Al Dhaheri for her solo exhibition of the same name, part of the  Sharjah Art Foundation’s autumn 2025 programme at Gallery 6, Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah.

Al Dhaheri completed her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2017 and has exhibited at Art Dubai, the Taipei Biennial and the Aichi Triennale. She is currently an assistant professor at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi. In her practice, which spans mixed media, sculpture, drawing, painting, installation, photography and printmaking, Al Dhaheri works with the motifs of time, endurance, repetition and care. Although most of the works in Restless Circle are not created using time-bound mediums like film, they are inextricable from time and defined by its effects, caught in moments of looping, breaking, fading and forming even as they appear static.

Braiding—whether rope or hair—is central to the exhibition, embodying repetition as a means to make, shape and bind. In Pull, Tie, Release (2024), for example, knotted cotton ropes hang from a frame, falling to varying heights. Through the title, the dimension of time becomes visible, illustrating the choreography behind the piece and underlining the moments of tension and release therein. Hair Bubbles (2023) makes the braiding motif even more visceral—small glass spheres are enclosed in a wooden frame, each holding fallen strands of the artist’s hair: detangled, braided and threaded through. Each bubble holds time—the moments spent arranging the hair and the years spent growing each strand.