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.