Saraab is the Arabic word for mirage. It indicates an optical illusion caused by atmospheric conditions, a natural phenomenon that has no physical form. Saarab is caused by the refraction of light from the sky by heated air and it is often depicted as the appearance of a sheet of water on a patch of the desert or on a hot asphalt road. We experience a mirage by sight and not through our other senses.

Plato's Theory of Forms argues that all the physical world is an illusion as well. It is not really the 'real' world; instead, ultimate reality exists beyond our physical world. However, Saraab is more than that. It is a notion we share mentally through collective culture and a concept that informs our perception of distinct cultural identities and ideologies. Therefore, the artists of the show move beyond the scientific term, or the connotations of distortion and illusion to explore and illustrate the cultural and philosophical aspects of this phenomenon as a combined expression of humanism, energy, emotion, as well as visible and invisible individuality.

Some of the artists, through materials and techniques, play with or against the conventions of form, observation, distortion, and illusion to create a variety of abstract outcomes. The aspiration here is that what we can’t see in the image is what we are going to imagine with our “mind’s eye” (Cartier-Bresson 1976), as we probably do with all conceptual semblances. Some others, through technical orthodoxy coupled with tones of absurdity and hyperreality connote solitude, distortion, and homogenization of culture through social and likable media

Being human means being ‘here” for temporary time. Transient through the ages, we can only measure time in human years, as opposed to Earth years. We make artworks to stop time. We also believe that our artworks will survive time. Is this not a mirage as well? Artists Aryam Alriyami, Fatima Alhashemi, Mahra Alshamsi, Mai Suhail, Mariam Almemmari, Ruqaya Alhashmi, Salmah Almansoori, Shama Almazrouie, Shereen Al Zaabi and Zainab Alhashmi, entertaining our trivial human pursuits, contribute mixed media works; paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, digital art, and installations that convey poetic expressions of being and not being, of life and extinction, of ends and beginnings, of visual saturation and infinite borders. The fictional space created in between through their representations helps chart an invisible map for us to follow to our destination toward a Platonic, collective soul.

For more: Saraab Booklet

Curator: Dr. Ioannis Papavasileiou, Salama Al Falasi
Organizer: Dr. Ioannis Papavasileiou: Ioannis.Papavasileiou@zu.ac.ae