Grey cement blocks lie in circles of sand, placed across a gallery space.  Piano wires ‘grow’ out of the blocks, giving them a plantlike appearance. The wires rotate, touching the sand and etching circular, repetitive patterns into it, echoing spirals left in the desert by plants moving with the wind. This is Restless Circle (2025), an artwork by Abu Dhabi-based artist Afra Al Dhaheri for her solo exhibition of the same name, part of the  Sharjah Art Foundation’s autumn 2025 programme at Gallery 6, Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah.

Al Dhaheri completed her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2017 and has exhibited at Art Dubai, the Taipei Biennial and the Aichi Triennale. She is currently an assistant professor at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi. In her practice, which spans mixed media, sculpture, drawing, painting, installation, photography and printmaking, Al Dhaheri works with the motifs of time, endurance, repetition and care. Although most of the works in Restless Circle are not created using time-bound mediums like film, they are inextricable from time and defined by its effects, caught in moments of looping, breaking, fading and forming even as they appear static.

Braiding—whether rope or hair—is central to the exhibition, embodying repetition as a means to make, shape and bind. In Pull, Tie, Release (2024), for example, knotted cotton ropes hang from a frame, falling to varying heights. Through the title, the dimension of time becomes visible, illustrating the choreography behind the piece and underlining the moments of tension and release therein. Hair Bubbles (2023) makes the braiding motif even more visceral—small glass spheres are enclosed in a wooden frame, each holding fallen strands of the artist’s hair: detangled, braided and threaded through. Each bubble holds time—the moments spent arranging the hair and the years spent growing each strand.

Elsewhere, five upright wooden rings sit alongside each other, coiled with multiple strands of thin cotton rope. The structure is held in place insistently by several bobby pins, at intervals of only a few centimetres. The sculpture, Round and Round We Go (2023), is defined by the visible strain of keeping itself intact. May Alqaydi, assistant curator at the Sharjah Art Foundation, spoke to STIR about the exhibition, saying, “Through Afra’s process, repetition becomes both fragile and alive, it carries time, emotion and persistence, and in a way, the exhibition lingers on endurance, the patience and quiet strength within those everyday habitual acts that usually pass unseen.”

The other side of this coin is unmaking, which Al Dhaheri explores in her series, To Detangle (2020). The work displayed in this exhibition shows messy braids of cotton rope emanating from a central structure atop a wooden platform. In different states of disarray and disentanglement, it speaks to the fading, rupture and unmaking that is inherent to the passage of time. It also draws attention to the labour of dismantling, positing that to unmake something might be a form of making in itself. To the contemporary artist, weaves are structures like all others—continuous with structures like society, family and the economy. Through her braid leitmotif, she poses important questions about what it means to construct and deconstruct systems, what it requires and how systems affect human life, labour and the perception of time.

Al Dhaheri further explores the idea of unmaking in earlier works, such as In absence we forgot (2015), where a canvas-like white fabric is suspended from the ceiling, with a thick grey border that has begun to flake and fade, loose strings hanging from the fabric’s hem as it frays. It is displayed alongside an artwork commemorating it, To Preserve (2017), an attempt to recall the work’s initial form even as it decays with time.

Al Dhaheri’s preoccupation with what changes and why, and what is left behind, forgotten and rendered invisible by progress, is inspired in part by her experience growing up in Abu Dhabi and the UAE at large, whose recent history is defined by a series of rapid structural changes. Spiral Staircase (2020), a triptych of acrylic and graphite drawings, depicts a now-fading element of Abu Dhabi’s architectural heritage—spiral staircases on the outside of buildings. These staircases connected outdoor areas in commercial and residential buildings, offering spaces for connection; their dwindling number reflects a shift in the city’s attitudes towards public and private spaces.

Al Dhaheri interrogates notions of change and progress in her works, such as in Restless Circle (2025), where the sustained circular motion of the ‘plant’ conveys the exhaustion of a constant striving for progress, while the randomness of the forces prompting the spirals questions the meaning of it all. Alqaydi elaborates on these reflections, saying, “Through Afra’s works, there is a space that is created to reflect on change and what it feels like to live within it. Restless Circle becomes a way of observing how time moves, and how things shift, return and settle again. It’s less about resisting transformation, and more about tracing the delicate balance between motion and pause that defines the world we inhabit today.”

Repetition holds an interesting place in Al Dhaheri’s artistic process—it can represent the labour and care that allows the work to come to fruition, but also a rote, stubborn approach that can lead to burnout. Al Dhaheri’s works encourage viewers to slow down, to witness and consider the present moment and let their actions be guided by more than the laws of inertia (an object at rest will stay at rest, and an object in motion will stay in motion). Restless Circle makes an argument for inhabiting the space between these two extremes.

‘Restless Circle’ will be on view from August 30 – December 14, 2025, at Gallery 6, Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah.