Asma Belhamar describes her experience of belonging to a place like the United Arab Emirates as ‘living in a time lapse’. To her, the compression of time and the expansion of space seem intensely surreal. This experience has led her to undertake a series of investigations about the geological and cultural tectonics of the country, exploring conflicts between natural landscape and architecture. Urban surroundings are precarious; even monumental and unrelenting structures—part of the phenomenon of ‘megastructures’—can change in a matter of days. Nothing is impossible to build, and buildings can be finished in double compressed time. This non-traditional spatial spectacle inspires her visual observation and guides her to express a contemporary poetic state of mind.

In her work, Belhamar questions the visual analogy between the transfiguration of space and the optical notion of the after-image, examining what lingers from her personal memories and how rapid, ephemeral and irreversible this experience is. She tries to convey these ideas by experimenting with light and moving images as well as constructing structures and creating dimensions for surfaces.  

The Edifice of Sba is an installation that juxtaposes compressed time and lingering visual memory from the perspective of a car in motion. This vision of time and memory is shared by both locals and residents who have witnessed the changes in the UAE over the last 50 years. Staging this common experience in a single scene by merging the solid and ephemeral qualities of two places—the mountains and the façade of the Toyota building, a well-known landmark in Dubai since the 1970s—this work can be seen as an illusory experience of time and memory. 

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