The Third Line presents From the Perspective of Language, a solo exhibition by Sara Naim, on display until 31 May 2026. It introduces a significant new chapter in the artist’s practice: her first public exhibition devoted to painting. Bringing together large-scale canvases produced between 2023 and 2026 alongside a newly commissioned video work, the show examines how language, symbols, images, and inherited belief systems shape the ways people understand themselves and the world.
Known for a multidisciplinary approach that moves fluidly between photography, sculpture, installation, and video, Naim has long been interested in perception and representation. Her works often question the assumption that seeing more clearly means understanding more fully. Instead, she suggests that close examination can reveal ambiguity, distortion, and instability. This conceptual thread runs through From the Perspective of Language, where both speech and imagery are treated as constructed systems that frame experience.
The exhibition’s central body of paintings shifts between figuration and abstraction. In these artworks, recognisable forms (botanical elements, maps, and bodily fragments) appear suspended within atmospheric fields of colour. The imagery is arranged associatively, allowing connections to emerge through proximity, contrast, and symbolism. The paintings offer viewers the opportunity to participate in the act of interpretation; meaning becomes something unstable and negotiated.
Several canvases belong to the Skin series, in which Naim treats the painted surface as if it were a body. The canvas becomes a porous membrane onto which symbols are layered like tattoos or inscriptions. This idea stems from Naim’s interest in how people use external markers to declare identity, allegiance, or belief. Yet such declarations can both connect and divide: symbols may create solidarity while simultaneously excluding others. Through this tension, the paintings explore how bodies become sites onto which ideology, memory, and social belonging are projected.
The surfaces themselves carry an intriguing visual logic. Some backgrounds draw from the soft gradients of computer desktop wallpapers, introducing a distinctly digital sensibility. The images float across these fields, resembling icons scattered on a screen. By combining references to technology with organic and anatomical forms, Naim collapses distinctions between the virtual and the physical. Her paintings reflect a world increasingly mediated through screens, where images circulate rapidly and are often mistaken for complete realities rather than fragments shaped by perspective.
The second gallery space features the new video performance titled Mother Practices Her Tongue (2026). In the work, the artist faces the camera in a portrait-like composition while attempting to pronounce Arabic letters and sounds. Repetition causes speech to fragment into breath, gesture, and guttural noise, dissolving semantic clarity while preserving emotional intensity. The art piece considers language not only as a communicative tool but as a bodily and sonic experience. It also reflects on estrangement, inheritance, and the emotional distance that can emerge when one’s mother tongue is partially lost.
This personal dimension is significant in understanding Naim’s wider practice. A London-born artist of Syrian heritage, she has consistently explored questions of identity, displacement, borders, and the mechanics of perception.
The theme of borders resonates politically within the exhibition. Naim has previously reflected on the artificial divisions imposed by national boundaries, particularly in relation to Syria and Lebanon. In her recent artworks, maps and territorial lines appear alongside bodily imagery, suggesting parallels between land and flesh: both can be marked, divided, wounded, and controlled. By merging geopolitical references with intimate anatomy, she reveals how large historical forces are experienced through individual bodies and memories.
From the Perspective of Language is less concerned with providing answers than with exposing the fragile frameworks through which answers are usually formed. Whether through painted symbols, digital references, or broken speech, Naim asks how meaning is produced and what remains when certainty begins to collapse.
About the artist
Sara Naim (b. 1987, UK) lives and works between London and Dubai. She received a BA in Photography from London College of Communication and later completed an MFA at The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.
Naim’s work has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions across the Middle East, Europe, and beyond, including Rays, Ripples, Residue (Warehouse 421, Abu Dhabi, 2025); VIMA Art Fair (Cyprus, 2025); Rose Tinted (solo) (Volt, Eastbourne, UK, 2022); Frieze London (2019); The Third Image, Biennale des Photographes du Monde Arabe Contemporain (Institut du Monde Arabe & Maison Européenne de la Photographie) (Galerie Binome, Paris, France, 2017); and many others.
Among her recognitions, Naim was shortlisted for the Taoyuan International Art Award (2023); she also received nominations for the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship (2020) and the Foam Paul Huf Award (2018), to name a few.
To learn more about From the Perspective of Language, please visit the exhibition’s official web page.
In addition, you might be interested in viewing the Urdu Worlds group exhibition.
