DUBAI: Here are three highlights from Sara Naim’s ‘From the Perspective of Language,’ running March 4 to April 7 at The Third Line in Dubai. 

‘Skin 5’

This is the Syrian artist’s fourth solo exhibition at The Third Line, and includes a new video performance — “Mother Practices Her Tongue” — which “abstracts the Arabic language into gestures and sounds that no longer produce coherent meaning.” Together with the show’s large-scale works such as this one, it “extends Naim’s ongoing investigation into how meaning is constructed through inherited systems such as language, symbols and ideology,” the press release states.

‘A Chickpea, Hummus’

This is one of the more figurative paintings on display in “From the Perspective of Language,” and an example of how Naim uses “arrangements of symbolically charged imagery” to “examine boundaries and the limits of representation,” the catalogue explains. The show as a whole “asks how meaning is constructed and imposed, and where intuition and effect persist beyond formal systems of representation.”

‘Skin 8’

The series of paintings titled “Skin” are inspired by Naim’s “interest in body tattoos as markers of belief systems” and “treat skin as both subject and medium, with the canvas functioning as a porous surface onto which images are layered,” the catalogue states. “By leaving space for interpretation, the paintings invite viewers to actively construct meaning — a process reflecting Kant’s idea that understanding arises not from objects themselves, but through engagement (with them).”