Afra Al Dhaheri on how pregnancy helped her break new artistic ground

The Emirati artist's solo exhibition at the Sharjah Art Foundation runs until December 14

Preview of Afra Al Dhaheri: Restless Circle at Sharjah Art Foundation. Sharjah. Chris Whiteoak / The National

Weeks before her solo exhibition at Sharjah Art Foundation was due to open, Afra Al Dhaheri found herself at an anxious deadlock. She was unable to produce the commissioned work she had envisioned.

The large-scale work was meant to be a highlight of the exhibition, a dramatic escalation of the fabric-and-cement technique she could usually do, as she puts it, “with my eyes closed".

But the work refused to come together. Cement lines flaked from the fabric, and the fabric warped under the weight of the cement.

“It wasn’t working the way I wanted it to,” she says. “It wasn’t peeling the way I wanted it to peel. It wasn’t like setting on the fabric the way I wanted it to set.”

Exhausted and dispirited, she called her curator, May Alqaydi.

“I was honest,” Al Dhaheri says. “I told her, ‘it’s failing. I don’t know why but it’s failing.’ I realised I couldn't deal with the scale of it. It was too much on my body. What my brain was used to thinking of making, my body wasn’t able to continue.”

Al Dhaheri with her work I Craved a Garden, it Emerged in the Folds. Chris Whiteoak / The National

Al Dhaheri then let Alqaydi in on the truth she had been carrying. It was, perhaps, the reason why she wasn’t able to work with her usual feverish determination, why she was constantly tired in the studio.

“This was my favourite moment,” Al Dhaheri says. “I called her and said ‘I really need to tell you something. It’s not an excuse. It’s a situation: I’m pregnant'.”

Alqaydi was sympathetic and said they could always find another an older work to replace what she had in mind. The exhibition, after all, was bringing together a decade’s worth of evolving practices and her idiosyncratic use of fabrics, cement and hair. There were also other new works they were highlighting – replacing one of the works would not detract from the exhibition.

But Al Dhaheri was determined to keep trying, even if she had to overhaul the concept for her piece and adapt it to her situation.

“I insisted. I told her, ‘Give me one week. I just want to try’,” she says. “And honestly, in this one week, I sat with myself and I’m like, ‘OK, you need to change the way you think. Let’s agree that your body cannot do it, can’t be put through the labour’.”

She unfurled the fabric again. This time, she cut it down and took a different approach. “I cut the fabric in half. And then I started creasing it. Each part took two to three hours to crease,” she says. “It was still laborious, but I was sitting, I felt good and it was progressing.”

The exhibition brings together a range of Al Dhaheri's works, from sculptures and drawings to video. Chris Whiteoak / The National

Although the process began as a concession to her own limits, Al Dhaheri found this process was helping her gain new ground in her practice. “It was supposed to be just a wash, just a full one colour. There was not supposed to be any circles or movement,” she says. “But I naturally found myself doing that, giving in to the intuition.” Layers of paint, crayon and pencil accumulated into something she hadn’t expected. “I craved a garden, and a garden clearly emerged here, in the folds,” she says, touching upon how the artwork got its title: I Craved a Garden, it Emerged in the Folds.

Comprising two long vertical drops of washed and stitched fabrics, suspended on the far-end of the exhibition space at Al Mureijah Square, the artwork came as a result of a new way of working, but its core principles – its preoccupation with time and repetition – were still deeply aligned with the greater body of work on view in Restless Circle.

Undoing a weave, unravelling a braid or loosening rope becomes a consideration on how identities are conditioned in time, and how they might be remade and reformed. Chris Whiteoak / The National

The exhibition, as a whole, embodies persistence through failure, time etched into material and the body negotiating its own limits. The works on view eloquently distill Al Dhaheri’s practice, her idiosyncratic vocabulary of ropes, fabrics, cement and hair, the materials she pushes, untwists, weaves and often exhausts to reveal hidden tensions.

Of her work with cotton fabrics, she says: “I was really interested in deconstructing the weave to begin with. A weave is a system. If we look at systems within society, within culture and ideologies, what does it mean to deconstruct a system?”

The question reverberates across the exhibition. Through the hair that is painstakingly collected and braided within delicate bubbles of glass, or the ropes boiled, dyed and pressed into dense, framed forms, Al Dhaheri treats material as an analogue for larger cultural and bodily structures.

Undoing a weave, unravelling a braid or loosening rope becomes a consideration on how identities are conditioned in time, and how they might be remade and reformed.

Conditioning the Knot (2022) is a sharp example of this. The sound-and-video installation was created during a residency in Milan. The work shows Al Dhaheri brushing a cotton mesh that has been woven on to the strings of an open piano. The tension of the act, the repetitive brushing, the hands faltering, the strings ringing with a choked timbre, accumulates into a reflection of endurance and labour.

Other works materialise time and effort in different ways. In Hair Bubbles (2023), the artist painstakingly detangled, arranged and braided fallen strands of her own hair, threading it through glass spheres. “It holds time,” she says of each bubble.

Hair bubbles by Afra Al Dhaheri. Chris Whiteoak / The National

At the heart of the exhibition is the work that lends it its name: Restless Circle.

The installation is inspired by the desert plants that draw circular patterns in the sand as they swerve with the wind. For Al Dhaheri, this ceaseless, spiralling movement, with no specific destination or purpose, offers a sharp metaphor to the fatigue inflicted by the constant expectation to produce and perform.

The set of moving sculptures are placed thoughtfully within the exhibition’s outdoor and indoor areas, playing between the boundaries of natural form and constructed object. In their circular motion, the works allude to the often-unperceived movement of these desert shrubs. The relatively rapid movement of the piano wire (the material Al Dhaheri uses to make the leaves of her shrubs) also instills a sensation of quickened time, as in the natural world, it is unlikely that you’ll ever find shrubs moving with such speed and consistency.

Restless Time, an installation that takes formal cues fro the desert shrubs of the UAE. Chris Whiteoak / The National

Yet, the trail they draw in the circular sand mount around them is all the same, and it is perhaps this that is the core part of the installation – the etches and grooves of the leaves that are remnants of movement and activity. It is from here that Al Dhaheri deftly proposes the plants as a metaphor for our collective preoccupation with progress and movement, even if it just has us spiraling within ourselves.

“We are these plants in a way,” Al Dhaheri says. “And that was the beginning of my thoughts towards collective exhaustion, and questioning if we have arrived to a state of collective exhaustion.”

Alqaydi, meanwhile, used the installation not just as an inspiration to the exhibition’s title, but a guide to its circular curation. “It’s something I really wanted to set the tone of the space with,” she says. “I wanted people to come back and circle back. There is no beginning and end to it.”

Restless Circle runs at the Sharjah Art Foundation's Al Mureijah Square until December 14