Free admission
Boundaries and Breaches
This solo presentation features a new body of work by Sara Masinaei (b. 1982, Tehran), developed during her residency as part of the Studio Support Program at Dom Art Projects.
Boundaries and Breaches explores the sensory and psychological experience of urban space. While it may appear liminal—a gap between destinations—this space is highly charged. It sustains personal memory, shapes our daily routines, and organises how we perceive the world around us. It preserves traces of use and loss, bearing witness to rupture, erosion, and forgetting.
For Sara, engaging with the urban fabric is not a formal experiment, but a means of addressing memory, mapping out the relationship between place and lived experience, between inherited histories and the environments in which new histories are taking shape. When passing through a city, our attention is usually drawn to those elements intended to be seen: architecture, monuments, squares, gardens, parks, etc. We rarely stop to observe the pattern of paving stones, the junctions between surfaces, or a tree growing unexpectedly through the sidewalk. Yet it is precisely this inconspicuous material layer that is in constant interaction with the body, directing movement, determining the rhythm of our steps, and marking the transition from one zone to another. For Sara, the ground becomes an active participant in our experience of space. It constitutes an almost imperceptible system of coordinates, turning spontaneous movement into a kind of programmed choreography.
Attuning to her own body, the artist neither attempts to submit to this choreography nor to oppose it. She collects found objects and records imprints of urban surfaces. Conducting a kind of archaeology of the surface, Sara lays canvas down on the ground, applying her bodyweight for every imprint. The image emerges as the result of an encounter between the body and the material fabric, making the artist both the author of the image and a conduit for a trace that is not entirely her own.
Other works shift in scale and material as they consider this relationship between order and disruption. Throughout, boundaries and breaches are not opposites, but conditions within the same system.
Boundaries and Breaches explores the sensory and psychological experience of urban space. While it may appear liminal—a gap between destinations—this space is highly charged. It sustains personal memory, shapes our daily routines, and organises how we perceive the world around us. It preserves traces of use and loss, bearing witness to rupture, erosion, and forgetting.
For Sara, engaging with the urban fabric is not a formal experiment, but a means of addressing memory, mapping out the relationship between place and lived experience, between inherited histories and the environments in which new histories are taking shape. When passing through a city, our attention is usually drawn to those elements intended to be seen: architecture, monuments, squares, gardens, parks, etc. We rarely stop to observe the pattern of paving stones, the junctions between surfaces, or a tree growing unexpectedly through the sidewalk. Yet it is precisely this inconspicuous material layer that is in constant interaction with the body, directing movement, determining the rhythm of our steps, and marking the transition from one zone to another. For Sara, the ground becomes an active participant in our experience of space. It constitutes an almost imperceptible system of coordinates, turning spontaneous movement into a kind of programmed choreography.
Attuning to her own body, the artist neither attempts to submit to this choreography nor to oppose it. She collects found objects and records imprints of urban surfaces. Conducting a kind of archaeology of the surface, Sara lays canvas down on the ground, applying her bodyweight for every imprint. The image emerges as the result of an encounter between the body and the material fabric, making the artist both the author of the image and a conduit for a trace that is not entirely her own.
Other works shift in scale and material as they consider this relationship between order and disruption. Throughout, boundaries and breaches are not opposites, but conditions within the same system.
DATE
September 23, 2026 - October 18, 2026
Sara Masinaei (b. 1982, Tehran) is a Dubai-based multidisciplinary artist working across installation, performance, photography, video, audio and mixed-media within a research-led practice. Her work explores themes of belonging, memory, identity, and the ways sociopolitical histories become embedded within landscapes, bodies, and everyday spaces. Through embodied processes such as walking, collecting, tracing, documenting, and spatial intervention, she investigates the relationship between personal narratives and broader cultural and political geographies. Her practice considers how identities and cultural narratives are continually formed, displaced, and reassembled through lived experience and site-specific engagement.
Masinaei holds a BFA in Visual Communication, with concentration in Photography, from the American University in Dubai (2004) and an MA from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2011).
Masinaei holds a BFA in Visual Communication, with concentration in Photography, from the American University in Dubai (2004) and an MA from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2011).