The Arab British Centre and Shubbak Festival are pleased to announce Limbs of the Lunar Disc, Sarah Al-Sarraj’s first London solo exhibition opening at Mimosa House featuring new and existing works, on the occasion of Shubbak Festival.
Last year, Al-Sarraj was commissioned by the Arab British Centre to create a new body of work. The resultant series of paintings, executed on large-scale wooden panels, present the speculative lifeways of a temporally nomadic tribe. Inspired by ancient Arabbian wayfinding and Indigenous ecological calendars, Al-Sarraj synthesized this research into a mythical narrative told through paint. The series was exhibited for the artist’s first solo exhibition, Separated by Millennia, at Two Queens Gallery in Leicester, alongside a research installation and public programme at the National Space Centre.
Since then, Al-Sarraj has undertaken research residencies in Cairo for Downtown Contemporary Art Fair, and UK New Artists #3 Cohort: the Language of Machines. These experiences laid the basis for a new immersive work.
For Limbs of the Lunar Disc, the artist presents her series of paintings alongside Isthmus Ancient River (2025), a new immersive film commissioned by Helen Starr’s Mechatronic Library. The film offers a journey down the river of time. Flowing from the distant past to the non-time of the present, we follow an Ancestor exploring the protracted impacts of current ecological violence.
Inspired by Laura Nasrallah’s concept of the ancestral assemblage, where we are duty bound to those who came before us, this show asks: how can we bring about intergenerational justice for those yet to come?
Influenced by the work of scholars Kathryn Yusoff and Karim A. Kassam, the works play with alternative temporalities to explore the deep time ramifications of our current anthropocenic era. Al-Sarraj critiques extractive linear temporalities while offering instead a regenerative ecological understanding of time. This is explored through metaphor in Al-Sarraj’s series of paintings and more overtly in her latest immersive work, which references nuclear waste isolation plants, resource extraction, and large scale irrigation projects.
Press release from The Arab British Centre
Image: Sarah Al-Sarraj. Isthmus Ancient River. 2025. Still image. Image courtesy of the artist
