Produced intermittently between 2023 and 2026, the large-scale paintings move between figuration and abstraction to examine boundaries and the limits of representation through arrangements of symbolically charged imagery. The series also includes a video performance, Mother Practices Her Tongue (2026), which abstracts the Arabic language into gestures and sounds that no longer produce coherent meaning. Together, the paintings and video extend Naim’s ongoing investigation into how meaning is constructed through inherited systems such as language, symbols, and ideology.
The fragmented paintings explore boundaries at individual, social, and national scales. Naim investigates these boundaries through multiple lenses—from quantum mechanics, which challenges fixed notions of objects, to biological forms like flora, grains, and skin, which shed, pollinate, and traverse landscapes, to symbols of inclusion and exclusion such as religion and a patrol dog.
Originating from her interest in body tattoos as markers of belief systems, the series treats skin as both subject and medium, with the canvas functioning as a porous surface onto which images are layered. Set against blocks of colour or gradients sourced from Mac desktop backgrounds, images appear digitally “dragged and dropped” and arranged through association rather than linear logic. By leaving space for interpretation, the paintings invite viewers to actively construct meaning— a process reflecting Kant’s idea that understanding arises not from objects themselves but through engagement.
The video work Mother Practices Her Tongue (2026) continues Naim’s earlier minimal video performances, framing the artist like a photographic portrait. The video explores how language shapes relationships to place, and the roles intuition and gesture play alongside the formal logic of language. Naim practices forming Arabic letters and sounds with her mouth, addressing the camera directly. Repeated out of sequence and in isolated units, these letters dissolve into abstract, guttural sounds, losing semantic clarity while retaining affect. Repetition operates as disruption— a glitch in communication— exposing language as a symbolic system onto which meaning is imposed rather than inherently contained.The video considers language as a bodily, sonic, and symbolic system that, like the painted images, becomes an interface through which experience is mediated.
Moving between image and speech, surface and body, From the Perspective of Language asks how meaning is constructed and imposed, and where intuition and affect persist beyond formal systems of representation.
