Part of Alserkal Art Week
Join us at 3:00pm for a tour of the public art commissions with artists Timo Nasseri and Sarah Almehairi and curator Nada Raza.
New site-specific commissions by Fahd Burki (Grey Noise), Ala Ebtekar and Sahand Hesamiyan (The Third Line), Timo Nasseri (Lawrie Shabibi), and Sarah Almehairi (Carbon 12), have taken shape within the public realm at Alserkal Avenue. Their ideas inspired a wider curatorial framework, The Follower, which encourages keener observation of the natural elements - the wind, the sun and the stars - as a means of wayfinding and regaining cultural knowledge.
The tour will start from Alserkal Arts Foundation, Warehouse 51
Learn more about The Follower here.
Biographies
Timo Nasseri (b. 1972, Berlin, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. He received his diploma in photography from the Lette-Verein, Berlin in 1997. Nasseri explores themes such as geometry, mathematics, architecture, calligraphy, and most recently, camouflage. Combining Islamic and Western cultural heritages, his work is inspired as much by specific memories and religious references as by universal archetypes described by mathematics and language, and the inner truths of form and rhythm. His work uses the means of natural science to open up a perspective for the poetic and fantastic. Nasseri takes his inspiration from mathematics, geometry and patterns and underlines their interconnectedness in terms of repetition and aesthetics in his drawings and sculptures. His practice is one that tackles the subject of infinity and that aims to solve puzzles, whether they are historical mysteries or the explorations via mathematical theorems to discover an overarching order in the chaos of existence.
He has participated in several group and solo exhibitions including Mercedes-Benz Contemporary (2022); Museum Konkrete Kunst Ingolstadt (2022); The British Museum, London (2021); The Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2021); Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2022, 2019); ZKM, Karlsruhe (2019); Sfeir-Semler Gallery (2009,12,15,19); CCA Andratx (2019); Stichting Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen (2018);the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto (2017); the Melbourne Triennale (2017); Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah (2017);Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt (2016); AK Vienna (2016); KW-Kunstwerke, Berlin (2015); and the Drawing Room Biennial, London (2021,2019, 2015). He was also the winner of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize in 2011.
Sarah Almehairi (b. 1998, Abu Dhabi, UAE) lives and works in Abu Dhabi and holds a BA in Art and Art History from New York University Abu Dhabi. Almehairi's overarching body of work unfolds a discourse on themes of materiality, systems & interrelations, memory, and language through the intuitive and poetic examination of narrative and abstraction. By engaging with geometric forms, she extracts and defines a structural language read time and time again to suggest a form other than its own– a map, a sentence, a puzzle piece. Through the process, they are broken down, built, and reassembled as continuous iterations of themselves. These elements towards telling a story are not so explicit, lines and layers are used throughout her pieces as a means of exploring clarity and organization of collected information. Working primarily with investigative range of media, she explores the push and pull of material to evoke a story that both conceals and reveals itself.She has participated in several group exhibitions, including Perceptible Rhythms/Alternative Temporalities, Middle East Institute, Washington DC (2022); Beyond: Emerging Artists, Abu Dhabi Art Commission (2022); Portrait of a Nation II: Beyond Narratives, ADMAF, Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi (2022), Intimate Dimensions, Hafez Gallery, Jeddah (2020); The Youth Takeover, Jameel Arts Centre Dubai, (2019); and the 35th Annual Emirates Fine Art Society Exhibition, Sharjah Art Museum (2018). Her solo exhibitions include Between (2019) and When the Ground Was (2022), Carbon 12 Gallery, Dubai. Almehairi is also co-founder of JARA Collective, a chapbook press based in Abu Dhabi.
Nada Raza is a curator and researcher whose work focuses on contemporary art from Southwest Asia. Raza is the director of Alserkal Arts Foundation and the founding artistic director of Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai, where her curatorial projects include Altered Inheritances: Home is a Foreign Place (2019); and Body Building, a thematic exhibition of lens-based work (2019).
Prior to this, Raza was Research Curator at Tate Research Centre: Asia, with a particular focus on South Asian art. She co-curated Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All (2016) and organised presentations of work by international artists, including Meshac Gaba, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Zarina Hashmi, Sheela Gowda, Amar Kanwar and Mrinalini Mukherjee. She was guest curator of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize (2014) and curated The Missing One, for the Dhaka Art Summit and the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (2016).
She has also worked on international art at the Institute for International Visual Art (Iniva) and at Green Cardamom in London. Raza holds an MA from the Chelsea College of Art and Design and is a doctoral candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art.