Kristina Sergeeva of Seeing Things
Sara Dhafer Alahbabi (b. 1990s, Abu Dahbi, UAE) is an Emirati conceptual artist whose practice reimagines the architectures of everyday life as poetic encounters. She works across sculpture, installation, photography, and sound, using urban forms as starting points to reflect on visibility, access, and belonging.
Her early work combined walking, mapping, and photographic documentation to trace the subtleties of Abu Dhabi’s urban environments — observing how nocturnal rhythms, informal architectures, and ambient light construct experiences of presence and invisibility. These projects laid the foundation for a practice deeply rooted in embodied research and sensitivity to detail. Over time, Alahbabi expanded this vocabulary into sculptural and material investigations that foreground thresholds, windows, and transitional spaces as metaphors for movement between interior and exterior, presence and absence.
In her current series, Wind’s Eye: Characters Archive, Alahbabi develops this language further, presenting works that stand both as autonomous objects and as collective arrangements. Made of wood in white with metal accents, these pieces shift architectural form toward character and personality. Their subtle finishes and material modesty challenge expectations of monumental or industrial sculpture, reframing abstraction through playfulness, approachability, and humanized presence. The works explore how architecture can function less as static structure and more as animated encounter.
Alahbabi holds an MFA in Art and Media (2024) and a BA in Visual Arts and Political Science (2016) from New York University Abu Dhabi. Alongside her practice, she serves as a Senior Interpretation Specialist at the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi, working in education, interpretation, and public engagement. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions including Wrapped Around Me (NYUAD, 2014), Here’s What They Think of Me (NYUAD, 2016), Portrait of a Nation (me Collectors Room, Berlin, 2017), Community & Critique (Warehouse421, 2017), It Comes in Many Forms (RISD Museum, 2020–2021), Bound (Bayt Al Mamzar, 2023), Learning to Unlearn (NYUAD, 2023), and Time Line Electricals: On A Timeline (421 Arts Campus, 2024).