The Salad Zone

The Salad Zone uses glimpses of multiple narratives including familial domestic tensions, a juvenile dream of going to Japan, one person’s tendency to smash TVs in moments of anger, and eating fish. While using scenes from the artist’s surroundings and life in Saudi Arabia, like streets or malls, the work does not attempt to provide the whole picture, but instead, takes a rhizomatic approach to story telling, shedding light on shards of the everyday that act as abstracts to an underlying narrative.

Sarah Abu Abdallah (*1990 in Qatif, Saudi Arabia) works with video, painting, text and installation. Her visual worlds are influenced by ever-changing surroundings between her travels and her home in Saudi, the visual data streams of the Internet, and the pop culture in the Gulf area among others. Her works are conducted by a search for a self and a sense of belonging. How does both manifest themselves in public and private space, especially through different framework conditions? Fragmentarily combined text and image material in this investigation refers to the transience of memories and to moments of anxiety in an ever faster spinning world. Abu Abdallah's works are full of poetry. Recurring motifs are moments of disappearance and destruction as well as questions of gender-specific coding and restrictions in the domestic and public spheres - also against the background of her role as a female artist in Saudi society. A central aspect in all her works is the metaphor of untamed nature versus nature restrained by man.