Sara Naim: Heartstrings

Sara Naim, Falter from the series Heartstrings (2015-16) Archival pigment print, 167 x 122 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Courtesy of the artist.

Heartstrings examines the internal and external tensions of the human body by looking at the artist’s own dead skin cells. Naim manipulates the initially accidental glitch that corrupts the image, as it mimics the relationship one has to their own internal body- non- retrievable information. The individual artwork titles in the series – Stare, Choke, Tense, Sweat, Falter, Palpitate- originate from physical manifestations of human emotions. This challenges the dynamic tension of the internal and external body. The concepts of boundary and proportion become questioned, and the dialects of scale become complicated, as the cellular lends itself to vast landscapes. Using the Scanning Electron Microscope, the black and white photographs are taken from scans of Naim’s dead skin cells collected from her fingertips- the point of our body that connects us to the external world through the sense of touch.