ALULA: “I think of my practice as a way of negotiating with memory, attempting to understand the human interior, and how our sense of identity is shaped and reshaped over time,” Jeddah-based Yemeni artist Sara Abdu tells Arab News. “I work through the body, but also through objects and inhabited spaces. I think of them as containers of memory, and I’m interested in what they hold and what can be extracted from them.”
Her latest solo exhibition, “Intimate Architecture of Belonging,” runs in Athr Gallery in AlUla’s AlJadidah Arts District until May 2. “In this exhibition, I began thinking through space as a reflection of inner states. I used familiar structures, made dysfunctional — leaving them paused, incomplete, or suspended. I wanted them to feel almost like a paused scene, something you can visually enter, but not fully inhabit,” she explains.
“For me, the exhibition becomes a kind of archive, drawn from a private interior and placed into a shared space, where memory, like architecture, is never fixed, but constantly shifting between what we hold onto and what quietly slips away.”
In much of her work, Abdu uses familiar household items — henna, hair, and even scent related to a particular memory.
“I think I’m always trying to create a certain closeness, where the work remains personal, but still allows the viewer to locate themselves within it,” she says.
Here, Abdu talks us through some of the works in the show.
‘Distance Begins Where Remembrance Ends’
This piece started from thinking about my family’s house in Aden — the one my mother grew up in, that I was only able to visit once. It’s a place that carries generations of memories. I didn’t live those experiences myself, but I inherited them through stories, through a sense of belonging that was passed on to me.
Being away from that context made me think a lot about what it means to belong to a place you didn’t fully experience. That’s what inspired the idea of the ground as a visual form. The tiles act as a kind of symbolic space, something you immediately recognize, but can’t fully access because of what they are made of: compressed henna, which makes them very fragile. In a way, they’re there to remind, but not to allow entry.
Henna is tied to intimacy, to the body, to moments of closeness. Here, it’s used in its raw state, detached from the body, almost freed from that direct connection. It becomes something that still carries memory, but at a distance. I think the work holds that tension between inheritance and experience, between intimacy and separation. It’s about wanting to return to something familiar, but realizing that distance has already been formed; you can approach it, but you can’t fully enter it again.
'Distance Begins Where Remembrance Ends'
‘A Landscape of a Memory’ and ‘You Are My Return’
These two works come from the same material and form, but they exist differently in space. Both are made from Adani bukhoor, so they’re experienced not just visually, but through scent as well. The smell is very specific, it’s something you would recognize in Yemeni homes — in my case, Aden. It’s how the houses I grew up in and around used to smell. I’ve always been interested in working with scent because of its temporal nature. It fades, but somehow stays in memory. I think of these works as a way of navigating memory through scent, a landscape that isn’t seen, but sensed.
For me, this scent became a kind of bridge. The same smell exists in homes in Aden, and in the home I grew up in (in Saudi Arabia). It connects two places through something intangible.
The repetitive process of making the pieces — placing each cube, building the surface —becomes very meditative. Even the making of the bukhoor is a process of layering ingredients to arrive at something that we would recognize as “home.” I collaborated with a woman who specializes in Adani bukhoor to recreate a scent that feels close to what both I and my mother remember. My mother’s reaction was very immediate. She said, “It reminds me of home.” As simple as it is, it carries so much.
‘A Landscape of a Memory’
July I: Emergence of a Guardian
“July” is a figure that has been part of my earlier practice, but has always appeared in illustrations and paintings. For this exhibition, I wanted to bring July into the space and give it a physical form. The works together create a theatrical, suspended scene, paused in time, almost frozen. It felt natural to have a presence within it, something that both witnesses, guards, and inhabits this environment.
July emerges partially from the ground, with only the head and hands visible. It exists in a space between realms, between presence and absence. That tension mirrors the larger themes of the exhibition, and the traces left behind in spaces we inhabit. I see July as a guardian, a presence that lingers in spaces, observing what remains after departure.
At the same time, it is a way of situating myself within the work, not as a literal self-portrait, but as a presence that carries memory and inhabits the space from within. In this way, “July” holds the exhibition together as a space of reflection, a threshold where memory, absence, and presence converge, where what has been left behind becomes the ground for what continues to form.
' July I: Emergence of a Guardian'
