Sarah Abu Abdallah

The Salad Zone

Using scenes from the artist’s surroundings and life in Saudi Arabia, we see disarrayed glimpses of multiple narratives include familial domestic tensions, a juvenile dream of going to Japan, the tendency to smash TVs in moments of anger, and eating fish. Never attempting to provide the whole picture, the film takes a rhizomatic approach to tell a story of everyday life.

Morning of Hope

Video work by Sarah Abu Abdallah

Zero Zero

Video work by Sara Abu Abdallah

Saudi Automobile

Through references to gender roles and the female experience, Sara Abu Abdallah's work explores issues of obscurity and value, probing the social and cultural conditions of life in contemporary Saudi Arabia. In her multidisciplinary practice, she creates associations of the poetic and the absurd. Saudi Automobile consists of an installation and a 10-minute looped video that shows Sarah Abu Abdallah painting the shell of a wrecked car with light pink paint, mainly as a gesture of defiance against the monopolisation of the privilege of driving by the men in her home country at the time. She paints the wrecked car like icing a cake, as if beautifying the exterior would fix its disfunctionality. In this exhibition, Abu Abdullah’s pink car is placed outside on the Platform of The Flying Saucer

Rosarium

For Rosarium, Sarah Abu Abdallah works in collaboration with Saudi filmmaker Reem al-Bayyat. The film tackles crying and shedding tears in both the romanticist and the ritualistic sense. The star of the film is the actress Rana Alamuddin, who we follow around her house as she attempts with resilience to resist the everyday through the act of crying. What at first appears to be a perfect household turns out to be a hallucination that unravels as the film goes on.