SARA NAIM

Dates of residency:  September till November  2015 
Born: 1987
Nationality: Syrian
Lives and works:  Paris and Dubai
Education: 
2014 MFA Fine Art Media The Slade School of Fine Art
2010 BA Photography London College of Communication
Selected shows:
2019 Building Blocks , The Third Line, Dubai
2018 Reaction, Parafin Gallery, London
2018 Artificial Impressions, Stedelijk Museum, Breda
2017 The Third Image Galerie Binome, Paris

Sara Naim 1 .png
 
download (1).png

THE ARTIST
Sara Naim is a Syrian visual artist who grew up between Dubai and London. Naim’s selected solo shows include Building Blocks, The Third Line, Dubai in 2019, Reaction, Parafin, London in 2018, When Heartstrings Collapse at The Third Line, Dubai in 2016; Heartstrings at Concrete, Hayward Gallery, London in 2016. Her works are featured in Art Forum, Phaidon, artnet, Dazed and Reuters. Naim was shortlisted for the Denton's Art Prize 2016, and won the Making Pictures Award D&AD, New Blood Award 2013. Commissions include Alserkal Avenue’s Artist Takeover in 2020, and her works are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, Australia. She was a resident at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris in 2019, 2018 and 2016. 

THE RESIDENCY
Using her own dead skin cells under the Scanning Electron Microscope,  Naim is interested in the glitches that disturb the photograph due to lagging in the image’s rendering. These communication glitches expose vulnerabilities in the technology’s anatomy, which Naim uses to address the fractured communication one has to their own internal body. At BAR, Naim drapes images of abstracted, glitched lungs onto wooden plinths, which are the same dimensions as her limbs, adjacent to protruding photographs. She oscillates between the micro and the macro, engaging the viewer with a multifaceted interpretation of the human body through distance and examination. She also produced a filmed conversation between her and her grandmother, with her mother acting as an Arabic to English translator. The video portrays her grandmother’s nostalgic recollection of her mother- a memory which isn’t her own, and the communication barrier caused between the generations.