Who I Become
Date:
Sunday 26 Apr, 2026
-
Thursday 30 Jul, 2026
Time:
11:00 a.m.
-
07:00 p.m.
Venue:
Block E, 2nd Floor, Maraya Art Centre, Al Qasba,
Sharjah,
United Arab Emirates
This exhibition brings together a body of work by Salmah Al Mansoori, an Abu Dhabi-based multidisciplinary artist and researcher born in Ghayathi, Al Dhafra. The works unfold as an ongoing exploration of memory, material, and place. The presentation reflects a practice in motion, moving between gathering, making, and reimagining rather than tracing a fixed trajectory.
Rooted in a deep engagement with her surroundings, Al Mansoori’s work begins with acts of noticing: fragments, residues, and overlooked materials drawn from everyday life. These elements are not preserved as static records, but are reworked into new forms that carry both personal and collective memory. Through this process, documentation gives way to transformation.
Material becomes a site of continuity. Handmade paper, infused with desert grasses, palm fibres, and natural pigments, holds traces of landscape and labour, while extending the life of what might otherwise disappear. These gestures remain tactile, grounded, and intimate, yet they open onto wider questions of belonging and inheritance.
Elsewhere, the work expands into space. Sculptural forms and installations bring together fibre, surface, and environment, allowing memory to be encountered not only as an idea, but as a physical and spatial experience. What emerges is not a reconstruction of the past; it is an ongoing negotiation with it, where meaning is shaped through repetition, transformation, and return.
Across the exhibition, nothing is held in a fixed state. What begins as an act of collecting becomes a process of reconfiguration, where materials shift, forms evolve, and associations remain open.
Al Mansoori’s practice does not seek to preserve memory as something complete, but to keep it in circulation, material, responsive, and continually becoming.
