Sara Naim

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

Sara Naim’s practice is inherently multidisciplinary: photographs are sculptural, sculptures painterly, and paintings reference photography. She investigates how meaning is constructed through inherited frameworks such as language, symbols, and ideologies, and how these paradigms shape our understanding of self and world. She often employs technological glitches as metaphors for the limits of language and its inability to capture intuition. This reflects a broader inquiry into how we explain ourselves through representation and symbols rather than lived experience. Sara frequently questions the assumption that proximity produces clarity, proposing instead that closeness leads to abstraction. This tension between distance and intimacy— often materialised through pixelation and scale— mirrors her relationship with her homeland, Syria, which was inaccessible to her for 15 years. At its core, her work examines how rigid notions of separateness operate across individual, social, and national frameworks. Natural motifs, particularly flowers, recur as a way of linking personal ancestry to wider geopolitical conditions. By tracing how people and plants take root across borders, her work unsettles the idea of fixed political and bodily boundaries.

Artwork