Sara Naim: Building blocks
Blurring the boundaries of memory
Sara Naim, From # 1 (2018) Digital print, wood, plexiglass, 70 x 84 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
With text by Sabrina DeTurk, art historian, curator, writer and educator.
Soap from Aleppo, jasmine flowers and soil from her grandmother’s garden—these are the materials that artist Sara Naim uses to explore her relationship to her native Syria, a location no longer physically accessible to her but which still looms large in her imagination and memory. Naim describes her nostalgia for Syria as “warped,” in that the longer she is distanced from her homeland, the more her view becomes skewed, her memories blurred.
In Building Blocks, Naim’s second solo exhibition at Dubai’s Third Line Gallery, the artist illustrates the push and pull between memory and materiality in sculpture, video are photographic works. Naim used a scanning electron microscope to explore the cellular structures of the Aleppo soap as well as the jasmine and soil that her grandmother sent her from Syria. The large-scale C-type digital prints that are exhibited capture a visual journey into the terrain of that which is at once intensely familiar and yet, paradoxically, becomes through micro-inspection wholly unknown. The shift between macro and micro and the idea of breaking down boundaries by looking at basic structures of these nostalgic materials is central to the artist’s practice. That her own dead skin cells become incorporated into the samples as she works with them further complicates and enriches her exploration.
Naim is also intrigued by the glitches that are introduced into her work through errors in the microscopes scanning process. Originally, she was offended by these unintentional errors but then came to see them as descriptive elements in the work in their own right. According to the glitches, which, ultimately, she began to intentionally introduce and embrace in the scanned output, help you realize that you don’t know something as well as you think you do –a disorientation which is connected to the experience of nostalgia. In a video work included in Building Blocks Naim filmed the monitor that shows her navigating the microscope across a sample. The nature of the process is such that a tiny sample of material can be navigated for hours, as the artist searches for its boundaries, looking for the edge . As the search plays out on screen, the viewer becomes lost in the abstraction of the sample, its material reality transformed into a surreal landscape. Naim notes that this tool, the scanning electron microscope, thus functions in a way that blurs boundaries and to complicate vision, despite our assumption that it is a technology intended to make visible and to clarify.
The photos and video are complemented by sculptural installations made from the same Aleppo soap used in the samples for scanning under the microscope. Naim had the soap manufactured in Syria, each bar stamped with the phrase “building block.” They are arranged in simple structures, the dull tan of the soap recalling the stone used in construction of traditional Syrian architecture. The blocks are built up in layers, evoking the metaphor of a cell as a building block. Thus, the shift between macro and micro is again apparent as the viewer glances from the abstracted detail of the soap samples as envisioned in the photo prints to the material reality of the soap structures on the gallery floor.
Naim is conscious of the “exoticism” that is sometimes projected onto Syria and the possibility, which she herself had to guard against, of “fetishizing” the country and its people. She views her work as not as an exercise in fetishistic nostalgia, however, but rather as a practice that has allowed her to become more engaged with her parents and the stories of their lives in Syria, as a way of remembering something she was never a part of and connecting to a physical past she will never know.