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
Dialects of the Body
Dialects of the Body explores the body’s sinuous division of interiority and exteriority.
Silent Scream mutedly records the artist scream for as long and as loud as possible, with a breath in between, until reaching the brink of her body. The performative video aims to test physical boundaries, which is contrasted against the RBG tone of her blood, marked through a red square adjacent to the video projection. Painted to the average size of the human face, the notion of expectation and realization are at play.
Video work Kul Shay Imkassr Lazim Embellash Min Jadeed recites a phrase that was echoed in early demonstrations across Syria, which translates to ‘Everything is broken, we must begin again’. As the mantra continues, Naim begin to repeat it incorrectly. The repetition offers distancing rather than familiarization, where the phrase becomes abstract and meaningless over time. The video indicates towards the performative nature of broadcasted news, which is voiced through its old domestic TV screen installation, where tragic events are often heard or unheard.
Reaction
Reaction consists of expired polaroid film that has been exposed to light, dissected, scanned at high resolution, to form sculptural photographs. Although chemical reactions are predictable and precise, the resulting microcosms of reactions here are precarious due to the Polaroid’s expiration. The constant magnification and examination of the film becomes a dichotomy to the polaroid’s original instantaneous way of image making.
The photograph’s rim mimics the content within the image as a way to free the works of internal and external tensions. Enlarging micro chemical reactions to embody their own shape plays with scale as an interchangeable aspect.
