The fair marks a personal milestone for Safeya Sharif Al Awadhi. After years of attending Art Dubai, she returns this year as an artist, showcasing a selection of solo works at Iris Projects alongside multidisciplinary artist Alyazia Al Nahyan. “It holds a special place in my heart; it's a fair I’ve been going to since I was an undergrad,” Al Awadhi says. “So to come here and show my work, particularly in this one, makes it more meaningful to me. The contribution feels more important.”
Al Awadhi’s presentation feels like a timely addition. Through a series of wall-based sculptures and studies, she looks at how shifting sand dunes can speak about time, memory and renewal, with each movement of the landscape leaving a trace while also changing what came before.
Using satellite imagery to track environmental shifts, she creates sculptures that reflect the contours of the desert, turning an undulating surface that is always changing into fixed sculptural form.
The clearest example is Lines of Persistence, a large wall-based linear sculpture that resembles dune ridges or contour lines. Its raised form and shadows make the landscape appear as a record of movement, a freeze-frame of terrain shaped by wind, time and environmental change.
“I was thinking about grids, and about how Dubai is moving fast, while also paying homage to what Dubai’s landscape is: the desert,” she says.
“Looking at the landscape from above changes how you understand it,” she says. “Every time I’m in the desert, I’m engulfed by this environment. But when I looked at the satellite images, the experience was different. I felt like I was holding the dunes.” Her process begins with drawing and repeated mark-making before the line becomes sculptural. Aluminium gives her a material that could hold shape while still bending. “What’s nice about aluminium is that it does the same thing that the desert does to you. It shows you that you can bend but not break.”