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.
Tender Grain
Tender Grain examines flora reliefs on Assyrian monuments as a way to pay hommage to plants that transgress across borders, despite and because of the shifting geopolitical conditions. These transformations open discussions about our relationship to land and to borders, and the series considers how plant migration echoes broader patterns of human migration, rooted in the fundamental need to evolve, adapt, and form diasporic communities.
The historical and botanical mapping of the Levantine landscape informs my interest in plants as symbolic carriers of continuity and displacement. This research resists romanticised notions of land, instead questioning how nostalgia and inherited identity shape our perception of connectedness and otherness. As a Syrian, I feel a strong affiliation to Syrian land, even when national borders attempt to redefine belonging. Jasmine acts as a sensory anchor that draws me into this process of identity-making. Differentiated culture and ancestry further inform how land is understood and remembered.
This series also explores how our perception of the past is constructed through recorded and therefore mediated histories. Many relics and monumental narratives are assembled and presented by specific institutions, which shape contemporary understandings of history.
The enlarged, pixelated images within the works reflect my interest in proximity and distance, creating distorted perceptions of connection and disconnection. The series examines how our relationship to land shifts as landscapes, borders, ecology, and geology evolve.
The collage pieces reassemble scraps from other flora images within the series to illustrate plants and people's need to congregate into an evolving broader ecosystem. The background features an extremely magnified handshake of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, slowing down the gesture to explore how a simple act of two hands meeting can carry implications for people and their land.
(selected works)
Heartstrings Collapse
Heartstrings Collapse explores the cross-over between physicality and emotionality. Glitches, which appear through a microscopy photographic process, describe the relationship one has to their own internal body: Inherent but unfamiliar. They behave as vulnerabilities in the technology’s anatomy, abstractly exposing themselves. Although internal workings aren’t typically seen, emotions physically manifest themselves through involuntary malfunctions, like a stream of sweat down the forehead from anxiety, cheeks turning red from embarrassment, or a choke when lost for words.
The series adopts such physical manifestations of emotions as image titles, such as Tremble, Sweat, Choke, Twitch, Palpitate and Blush.
Rose Tinted
Rose Tinted investigates the notion of perception and how it’s shaped through expectation.
The sculptured landscapes are shaped by generalised depictions of utopic scenes, forming trees, mountains, city scapes, a sunset. The photographic depictions, however, do not match their surrounding shape. This misalignment stems from the contradiction between the ideal and real, or the perception of something and its reality.
The series builds upon my preoccupation with borders, examining how they emerge from our expectations. In this ‘medium scale world’, the perception of division, lines, and boundaries are ingrained. Our anticipation of borders not only enhances their significance but also molds our understanding of them. Ultimatley, our expectations fundamentally influence our perception.
Building Blocks
“Building Blocks extends the artist’s preoccupation with micro images and dichotomies between proximity and distance, into an examination of memory and cognitive associations. This series maps the cellular make up of three elements meaningful to the artist: jasmine and soil from her grandmother’s Damascus garden, and Aleppo soap. Triggers of olfactory memories sourced from Sara’s native Syria, the protagonists of these works awaken thoughts of things and places she associates with the realm of the familiar, yet also perceived as foreign.
Using a Scanning Electron Microscope, Sara captures the cellular structure of each sample. The large-scale renditions include deliberate glitches such as formal distortions, light leaks or reticle crosslines—interferences that further abstract the works and hint at the imperfection of memory and longing.
The organic shapes that imitate topographies Sara randomly encounters during her scanning journey, explores the relief of all three samples morphed into one. Ensues the uneasy realization that coming closer is here synonymous with grasping less.” Coline Miliard
