Afra Al Dhaheri

Afra Al Dhaheri (b. 1988) is an Emirati artist. She works in sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, installation and mixed media. Her subjects include time, adaptation, rigour and fragility, rooted in growing up in Abu Dhabi as the country changed quickly. Repetition is central to her process, as a way to stretch time and to live through each stage of a work.

She completed an MFA at Rhode Island School of Design in 2017. In 2014 she took part in the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship, run with the same school. In 2019 she held a residency at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, Cornwall. She teaches at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, where she is an assistant professor of visual art.

Green Art Gallery in Dubai has given her two solo exhibitions, Split Ends (2021) and Give Your Weight To The Ground (2023). An earlier solo show, Inevitable Ephemera, took place at T + H Gallery, Boston, in 2016. Her group exhibitions include Conscious Becoming at Tatjana Pieters, Ghent (2021), and Acacia Seeds at Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris (2024). In 2022 the Richard Mille Art Prize named her a finalist.