about me

SARA AREF AHLI

Portrait photographed by Evan Delpeche

(b. 1993) is an Emirati and Colombian-American visual artist based between Dubai, United Arab Emirates and Providence, Rhode Island. Her interdisciplinary practice spans fashion, sculpture, installation, and glass, exploring themes of body, memory, and home. Ahli’s work delves into the physicality of creation and the uncanny, investigating narratives that scrutinize the vulnerability, thresholds, limitations, and resilience of the human form.



Ahli’s artistic journey includes her debut solo exhibition, “A Placeless Place,” at The Foundry, Dubai in 2021, and showcases at prominent venues such as the Sikka Art & Design Festival (Dubai, 2022), Aisha AlAbbar Gallery (Dubai, 2022), Made in the Emirates at Sotheby’s (Dubai, 2021), and Community & Critique at Warehouse 421 (Abu Dhabi, 2020). In 2020, she completed the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF) as part of Cohort 7 in collaboration with the Rhode Island School of Design. Ahli holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design (2024) and a Bachelor in Fine Arts in Fashion Design from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco (2015).

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My work stems from involuntary memories embedded within my body, resurfacing as visual fragments eager to transform into poignant narratives.


At the core of my practice is the exploration of the body as a repository for memory and the home as both a container and curator of lived moments.
Within its walls, the home cradles the imprints of familial bonds, personal growth, and transient moments—a dynamic intersection of nostalgia, comfort, and shared experiences.



In my studio, I engage in artistic archaeology, navigating spaces of containment and release, construction and deconstruction, decay and preservation.


I create invitations to encounter a tapestry of spaces that shelter pieces of my past, whispering stories lived and yet to unfold.


These spaces allow past and present to linger and interlace, inviting viewers to confront and interrogate their own bodies in space.

Shaping glass becomes an intimate dance, with my body acting as both tool and medium, material and conduit.

Through this process, I explore physicality and labor, uncovering the body's thresholds and exposing hidden interiors.With its fragility and malleability, glass serves as a metaphor for the human form, inviting me to explore new dimensions of movement and space. This embodied practice reveals repeated impressions of a self positioned elsewhere, embodying a space of presence and absence—a memory of a body that has passed.

My work finds completion in the viewer.I invite them to ponder the intricacies of embodiment, memory, and the spaces in between, forging connections between the tangible and the ephemeral, the seen and the unseen.

Have questions, want to collaborate, or connect? I’d love to hear from you!
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