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Asma Belhamar

Asma Belhamar

Asma Belhamar

Born in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; lives there.

Distorted Familiarities

Glass-fibre reinforced concrete and steel structure
380 x 277 x 109 cm, 102 x 283 x 184 cm, 280 x 355 x 96 cm

© Asma Belhamar 2021
Commissioned by and Collection of Expo 2020 Dubai
Cover photo: Thorsten Arendt in cooperation with Roman Mensing (detail)

Location

Asma Belhamar's practice frequently confronts the visual memory of local landscapes. Through this anchoring theme, she merges architectural and organic elements, translating them into hybrid materialities. Overall, her practice engages with notions of time and spatial memory.

This installation confronts perspectives of nature and the built environment, marrying the two realities. Belhamar speaks to the visual distortion experienced when commuting from mountainscapes into cityscapes, where the change from landscape to architecture and from topography to iconography feels like a journey through shifting scales and times.

By borrowing fragments from different landscapes, these sculptural works dismiss the grandiosity of fixed formations, whether mountains or megastructures. The individual pieces are staged in tangible proximity, and together, these new formations may well question how memories oscillate between spaces and sensorial perspectives.

Asma Belhamar: Distorted Familiarities. 2021
Glass-fibre reinforced concrete and steel structure
Commissioned by and Collection of Expo 2020 Dubai.
Photos: Roman Mensing and Thorsten Arendt

More in UiU:

Text and information: Expo 2020 Dubai Public Art Programme.

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