Sara Naim does not see images as neutral. Nor does she treat language as a stable system. In her latest exhibition at The Third Line gallery in Dubai, the London-based artist of Syrian origin pulls both apart, exposing the fragile structures that shape how we understand the world.
From the Perspective of Language presents a body of work created between 2023 and 2026, marking Naim's first public showing of these paintings. The exhibition moves between figuration and abstraction, extending a practice that has long spanned photography, video and sculpture. At its core is a persistent question: how is meaning constructed? And what happens when those systems begin to break down?
“I believe we are born into a framework for understanding the self and the world,” Naim says. “My practice invites us to deconstruct those paradigms.”
That inquiry takes material form in Skin, a series of large-scale canvases that fill the gallery with softly shifting gradients. Derived from Apple desktop backgrounds, the fields of pale yellows, pinks and greens create an atmosphere that feels both digital and organic. Across these surfaces, fragments of imagery float, cluster and expand, resembling icons scattered across a screen.
For Naim, the canvas itself becomes a kind of body. “I treat the canvas as though it were skin, on to which symbols are placed almost like tattoos,” she says. The idea began with an interest in how people use tattoos to express identity. “You’re announcing your ideologies. You’re externalising something internal,” she explains.
Yet that act of expression is not neutral. It creates both connection and division. “As much as you are allowing others to align with you, you are also excluding those who don’t share those ideologies,” she adds.
This tension between inclusion and exclusion runs throughout the exhibition. Anatomical diagrams of eyes, mouths and larynxes appear alongside botanical illustrations of flowers and crops. A dissected bloom sits beside a fleshy, skinless eye. Elsewhere, a screaming mouth opens into the surface of the canvas. These images invite close inspection, suggesting that boundaries dissolve under scrutiny.
Naim is particularly interested in the idea that what we see is only ever partial. She cites the work of neuropsychologist Donald Hoffman, who argues that human perception functions as a simplified interface rather than a direct window into reality. “What we see is a representation,” Naim says. “We’re not dealing with what’s behind it.”
That concept extends to her use of digital motifs. Icons, emojis and map tools are embedded within the paintings, echoing the visual logic of contemporary screens. In an age of constant circulation, Naim questions the authority of the visual.
“We’re constantly consuming images as though they are complete,” she says. “But they’re always fragments, mediated by someone else’s perspective.” Even before the rise of artificial intelligence, she notes, theorists such as Susan Sontag warned of images replacing direct experience with a kind of emotional distance.
That concern feels newly urgent. “Reality and documentation and fiction are going to blend in ways we can’t even perceive yet,” Naim says of AI-driven imagery. “They already are.”
If images are unstable, then so too is language. This becomes explicit in the exhibition’s video work, Mother Practices Her Tongue. Presented as a portrait, the piece shows Naim attempting to articulate Arabic letters through repetitive vocal exercises. Sounds stretch, fragment and falter, turning speech into something physical and strained.
The work is rooted in personal experience. Although Arabic is her mother tongue, Naim grew up largely disconnected from it. “I always felt on the edge of my culture,” she says. “Language gives you access; without it you lose nuance.”
Becoming a mother has sharpened that awareness. “It made me realise I’m not passing that language down,” she says. “That creates a distance from something you’re supposed to be part of.”
In the video, language is reduced to its most basic components, stripped of fluency and reassembled as sound. It mirrors what the paintings attempt visually: to dismantle systems of meaning and reveal their underlying structures.
The question of boundaries also carries a geographical dimension. Several works draw on aerial images of the border between Lebanon and Syria, a landscape Naim travelled through frequently. From above, she notes, there is no visible distinction between the two.
“The mountains are the same, the vegetation is the same,” she says. “The division exists because we’ve drawn a line.”
This idea is echoed in references to the Sykes-Picot agreement, the colonial framework that reshaped the modern Middle East. In Naim’s paintings, these geopolitical forms are abstracted until they begin to resemble fragments of the human body, collapsing the distinction between land and flesh.
“I often think the body and land behave in similar ways,” she says. “They both carry marks. They both divide and rupture.”
Across the exhibition, such parallels accumulate without resolving into a single meaning. Instead, Naim constructs what she describes as “constellations” of imagery, where interpretation remains open and unstable.
That refusal of certainty is deliberate. Whether working with symbols, images or language, Naim resists fixed definitions. Meaning, in her work, is always shifting, always negotiated.
“We’re never really seeing the real thing,” she says. “We’re always engaging with representations.”
From the Perspective of Language is on display at The Third Line in Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, until April 7
