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These motifs sit within the compositions like elements on a computer desktop, recalling the visual logic of screens where images are flattened, compressed, cropped and edited. The artist alludes to the way images are decontextualized yet circulate as truth.
Across the works, forms drawn from both the body and the natural world recur. Anatomical diagrams of the eye, the larynx and the mouth appear alongside botanical illustrations of flowers and agricultural crops such as wheat. A flower is dissected to reveal its internal structures, while next to it sits a skinless fleshy eye replete with thick lashes. In one painting, the inside of a screaming mouth is depicted, while in another the internal structure of a flower mirrors its form. For Naim, these dissections are an invitation to look closer. Scientific diagrams and ideas associated with quantum mechanics, which challenge fixed notions of objects, also appear throughout the canvases. References to the digital world emerge in the paintings as easily overlooked details: a screen capture icon, the zoom feature on digital maps, a color palette chart, or a small emoji. These motifs sit within the compositions like elements on a computer desktop, recalling the visual logic of screens where images are flattened, compressed, cropped and edited. The artist alludes to the way images are decontextualized yet circulate as truth.
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Sara Naim discusses her painting, Skin 5 (2023).
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The series’ title, Skin,refers to the artist’s research into tattoos and how symbols become embedded directly onto the body’s surface. Similarly, Naim’s paintingsact as surfaces onto which fragments of visual language are inscribed. The eye, a recurring feature across the series, points to the artist’s interest in perception—how things are seen, interpreted and understood. In the paintings, meaning and representation remain ambiguous. Through the vast array of imagery, false dichotomies between plant and human, natural and digital, online and physical worlds, are collapsed. By assembling shifting constellations of imagery across her canvases, Naim interrogates representation as a coded language.
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Together, the three works represent the series’ most intense expression of color, form and imagery—yet they resist fixed interpretation, leaving meaning deliberately unresolved.
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Naim approaches skin not only as a surface onto which meaning is inscribed, but also as an imagined boundary. This idea extends beyond the body to questions of land and territory.
Naim approaches skin not only as a surface onto which meaning is inscribed, but also as an imagined boundary. This idea extends beyond the body to questions of land and territory. The recurring depiction of the landscape between Lebanon and the artist’s homeland of Syria reflects her inquiry into borders as both constructed and material forms of separation and containment which define belonging. An illustration of the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement appears in one painting—the colonial map that partitioned the Middle East into modern nation-states. Abstracted into simplified shapes and blocks of color, the geographical formations begin to resemble anatomical fragments. Elsewhere, depictions of tents and clothes drying on barbed wire evoke refugee camps, recalling the enduring legacy of colonial history in the region. Across the paintings, references to division and control appear: a cross pendant, a border patrol dog, and a scene of police carrying away a person. This symbolically charged imagery reflects Naim’s inquiry into the social and political mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion across multiple registers.
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Sara Naim discusses her painting,A Chickpea / Hummus (2025).
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Still from Sara Naim, Mother Practices Her Tongue, 2026, Video performance, 3 min 21 sec. -
Across painting and video, From the Perspective of Language reflects Naim’s sustained inquiry into how meaning is produced, transmitted and interpreted. The paintings assemble fragments of visual language, while the performance dismantles spoken language into breath, rhythm and sound. The works point to the multitude of systems that construct and impose meaning, while revealing how it also operates as a shifting interface through which perception, identity and experience are continually negotiated.
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Excerpt from Sara Naim, Mother Practices Her Tongue, 2026, Video Performance, 3 min 21 sec.
Sara Naim: From the Perspective of Language
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