Afra Al Dhaheri, Dining East or West, 2016
Artistic vocabularies defined by process and materiality are not a novelty. Emirati artist Afra Al Dhaheri’s vocabulary is irrevocably tied to her use of rope, cement, steel, hair, and wood—and the novelty lies in the labour that centres her process, materials, and outcome. In her video work Conditioning the Knot (2022), a hand with a tool scrapes away inconspicuous knots connecting cotton threads with the strings of a musical instrument. The sound of the scraping with the off-tune instrument demands the viewer’s sensory labour, depicting the simple process of detangling a piece of fabric and the materiality of each element. This sensory labour is coupled with the invisible intellectual and manual labour that defines Al Dhaheri’s large-scale sculptural installations made of rope, thread, knots, and hair.
In her exhibitions Give Your Weight to the Ground (2023) at the Green Art Gallery in Dubai and Restless Circle (2025) at the Sharjah Art Foundation, Al Dhaheri refers to a quip by her mother: “Take your fallen hair and bury it in the soil of your house plant. They will nourish it.” Scientifically, hair falls when it has died and no longer bears a connection to the nervous system of the human body. Al Dhaheri, based on the above quip, imagines fallen hair to be worthy of a nourished afterlife, especially in more recent works like Don’t pull my hair (set of two) (2023), made of cotton rope on stained wood and concrete cinderblock. Two pieces of wood have cotton rope hanging down from the edges and reaching the floor. The entanglements become more complicated as the rope reaches the floor. Each abstract sculptural piece is reminiscent of a female body burdened by the fast-paced world and women’s role within it. The two pieces of wood rest on each other at the top at a risky angle, almost falling onto each other. For the artist, this burden is held by the earth within the intangibility of time. Grounding amidst the restlessness of the world is a necessity for survival, according to Al Dhaheri, who believes that the closer we are to the earth, the more nurtured by it we will be.