Sarah Abu Abdullah is a multidisciplinary artist who investigates Saudi Arabian sociocultural conditions. Her analysis of the Kingdom’s changing landscape is a heterotopic allegory in her work. By integrating conversations among friends, family, and her community into her collaborative pieces – which include video, painting and installations – she associates with the poetic as well as absurd. She creates speculative spaces and narrative assemblages based on fragments of reality colored by absurdity and awkwardness, drawing upon the forms of everyday life as well as her native experiences.
Sarah’s work diarizes mundane activities, recasting shared public spaces and home architectures into relatable subjects through which she investigates the subtexts of everyday life. Through her abstract logic approach, seemingly unrelated subjects and outwardly abstracted fragments become outlying expressions of a significant and underlying narrative they all share.
Recent collaborative exhibitions include Feeling The Stones (2021) - curated by Philip Tinari in collaboration with Wejdan Reda, Luan Shixuan and Neil Zhang - at Riyadh’s Diriyah Biennale as well as Unsettled Objects (2019) - curated by Omar Kholeif – at the Sharjah Art Foundation in Sharjah, UAE. Recent solo exhibitions include For The First Time in a Long Time at Dubai’s Jameel Arts Centre and at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany (2019).
Abu Abdallah holds a Master’s in Digital Media Art Studies from Rhode Island School of Design, and a BFA from the University of Sharjah, UAE. She undertook several residencies including Tokyo A La Carte: The Backers Foundation; AIT Residence Programme in Tokyo, Japan; and the Creative Exchange Lab residency at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in Oregon.
Collections at Amsterdam’s Greenbox Museum and the Sharjah Art Foundation in Sharjah, UAE, include some of Sarah Abu Abdullah’s work.