Photographer: Greg Adamski
It’s no secret that the United Arab Emirates is home to unparalleled vision, talent and determination, so to celebrate the country’s 51st National Day, we have chosen three inspiring Emirati women — Alia Al Mur, Hamda Al Fahim and Afra Al Dhaheri — from different fields, who represent the nation’s gloriously multifaceted cultural landscape.
Here, Rhode Island School of Design MFA graduate and The Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists fellow Afra Al Dhaheri shares with us the importance of grassroots initiatives, what her practice has taught her about herself, and her thoughts on the future of the UAE art scene .
...
In my practice [as an artist], I’m unlearning how I’m told things naturally should exist or how materials should be used. I try to unlearn to come up with new ways of experiencing these materials, exposing their rawness and forms. When I coat foam with cement, I’m turning it into this little kind of architectural object – when in reality, it’s a material that’s usually used to reinforce buildings. When I take rope and untwist it, it becomes wavy, so I’m interested in that because it gives the idea of the life of the rope before it existed in my work. It becomes a way of acknowledging the conditioning that this material went through.
For me, the unlearning process – it’s a process. It’s about taking back objects or materials to their original form, metaphorically like unlearning certain ideologies that don’t make sense to me. For example, growing up with curly hair and having to straighten my hair to be presentable, where does that come from? If you think about it, it sounds like a very western kind of inherited colonialist ideology. But do we question it in that way? I don’t think so.