Sarah Abu Abdallah: For the First Time in a Long Time

This exhibition brings together works produced by the artist in the last six years. Working across video, painting, text and installation Sarah Abu Abdallah’s work is a meditation on our media-saturated present, and the tension between our virtual personas and real lived experiences. Influenced by the vast and constant online flows of data and images as well as pop culture in the Gulf, her work is an intimate reflection on the anxieties of a hyperconnected present. Often diaristic and personally referential, Abu Abdallah’s video works reflect on how power inhabits the mundane details of every day, from the architectural configurations of a family home to the way public roads are accessed and navigated. Presented here are two video works The Salad Zone (2013) and The House That Ate Them Whole (2018), both focusing on the rituals and residues of daily life as a way to open up the wider conversation on social codes that transcend public and private spaces. A large-scale painting, commissioned for the exhibition, brings together images and forms collected from the artist’s daily encounters, while installation of living, heirloom tomatoes stands as a monument to a type of tomato grown in Saudi Arabia that has now disappeared due to land reforms and urbanization, touching on the inability to fully recreate what has been lost.

About Sarah Abu Abdallah

Sarah Abu Abdallah (b.1990) lives and works in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Abu Abdallah studied Digital Media Art Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design and at the University of Sharjah. She has shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions including the Gwangju Biennial 2018, Sharjah Art Foundation (2018), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2017), Centre Pompidou (2017), Chicago Underground film festival (2015), Luma Foundation (2015), Serpentine Galleries (2013), Whitechapel Gallery (2013) and the  55th Venice Biennale (2013).

The exhibition is a co-production with the Kunstverein in Hamburg. The exhibition is accompanied by an artist monograph Sarah Abu Abdallah: For the First Time in a Long Time, published by Kaph Books, Art Jameel and the Kunstverein in Hamburg.