COLLECTION: ALAA EDRIS

Alaa Edris uses photography, film and performance to enact experimental mappings and manipulations of her social and urban environment. Acting as anthropologist, cartographer and sci-fi voyager, she contends with dominant issues from the field of Arab artistic research, including the construction of gender, the relationship between tradition and progress, and language as a medium for identifying, shaping and articulating a culture. She completed the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF), in partnership with the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Abu Dhabi (2015), and participated in a residency at Fondazione Cini in Venice through an award from the Emirates Foundation (2011). Edris’ work has been presented in exhibitions across the region and internationally. In 2019, she presented her first solo exhibition titled Unreal. Unseen. Untouch. at 1X1 Gallery, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai. Alaa Edris currently lives and works between Sharjah and Abu Dhabi.

About the Artworks

In Playing Spaces Alaa Edris presents works from three different series including, Reem Dream, State, and Circus. Throughout the selected pieces, Edris abstracts architecture in recreations of sci-fi inspired sets immersing herself in considerations of her surroundings. The presented series addresses the tug between progression and tradition, and articulation and erasure. Uncertainty and the fragile boundaries between beauty and fear are drawn in these works.

Past Exhibitions

Solo Exhibitions

2019, Unreal. Unseen. Untouch., 1X1 Gallery, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai

Group Exhibitions

2019, Fragments, Yesterday and Today, Gateway, Abu Dhabi Art, Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi 

2019, Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber, SAF Art Spaces, Sharjah 

2018, From Barcelona to Abu Dhabi: Works from the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA in dialogue with the Emirates), Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi

2017, Is Old Gold?, Dubai Community Theatre and Art Centre (DUCTAC), Dubai

2016, Al Haraka Baraka, Maraya Arts Centre, Sharjah

2014-2016, Past Forward: Contemporary Art from the Emirates, touring exhibition to Washington, DC and six US states

2013, In the Absence of Script, Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah

2013, Moving Image Art Fair, London 

2010, Experiment, Maraya Art Center, Sharjah