Alongside its presentation of works by Mandy El-Sayegh, The Arts Club Dubai is currently hosting I Construct What I Want to Disrupt: Misaligned Enjambements, a solo exhibition by Emirati abstract artist Sarah Al Mehairi. On view on the first floor as part of the Club’s Stairway Exhibitions (a series of shows staged along its grand staircases), the show will be open to the public until October 2025.
The display features three of Al Mehairi’s largest artworks to date (350 x 200 cm), created as part of her ongoing Off-Centered series and commissioned specifically for The Arts Club. Constructed from custom-built wooden canvases, they respond directly to the Club’s notable interiors, with the deep maroon walls becoming integral to the compositions. Through layered cutouts, the artist explores a dynamic interplay between presence and absence. Combining digital planning with intuitive mark-making, Al Mehairi engages with ideas of balance, disruption, and spatial rhythm. The exhibition title references enjambement (a poetic technique where a sentence or phrase continues from one line to the next without punctuation), which echoes Al Mehairi’s interest in exceeding formal boundaries.
About the artist
Sarah Al Mehairi (b. 1998, Abu Dhabi), who is based in her hometown, obtained her BA in Art and Art History (Visual Arts Track) from NYU Abu Dhabi in 2019. She uses mixed media, sculpture, painting, book art, and fibre art to explore themes of identity, language, materiality, and memory. By working with geometric forms, the artist develops a visual language that shifts between map, sentence, and puzzle piece: forms that are continually deconstructed and reassembled into new iterations.
Lines and layers recur throughout Al Mehairi’s work; they serve as tools to organise and clarify fragments of information. Poetry, both as inspiration and as a material presence, threads through the artist’s practice. It allows her to challenge conventional artistic approaches while probing cultural and social constructs.
Al Mehairi has displayed her artworks in various exhibitions such as At The Edge, Art Week Riyadh (Riyadh, KSA, 2025); Perceptible Rhythms/Alternative Temporalities (MEI Art Gallery, Middle East Institute, Washington DC, USA, 2023); When the Ground Was (solo) (CARBON 12, Dubai, 2022); SEAF Community & Critique (Warehouse 421, Abu Dhabi, 2020); and The Youth Takeover (Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, 2019), among others.
Al Mehairi has participated in the Cultural Foundation Art Residency (Abu Dhabi) in 2021 and the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship, Cohort 7 (Abu Dhabi) in 2020. In 2024, she was a finalist for the Louvre Abu Dhabi Art Here – Richard Mille Art Prize. Her works are part of major public collections such as the Jameel Arts Center and Khouri Art Foundation (Dubai).
To get more information about I Construct What I Want to Disrupt: Misaligned Enjambements, please visit the exhibition’s official web page.
You might also be interested in viewing The Imaginary Museum at Rizq Art Initiative.
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