Inside Sarah Brahim’s Language of Movement, Memory, and Light
Explore Sarah Brahim’s somatic language as she choreographs memory, grief, and presence across dance, film, and immersive installation.
Contemporary
In a time when art increasingly crosses borders and disciplines, Sarah Brahim emerges as one of Saudi Arabia’s most quietly radical voices. A choreographer, filmmaker, and installation artist, her work traverses movement, memory, and the metaphysical.
The body is not contained by the skin but, reaches out into the world, merging through perception, interaction and action.
It is through this belief that Brahim transforms breath, gesture, and grief into portals for healing and presence.
A glimpse into Sarah Brahim’s multidisciplinary practice, where performance, textile, and film converge to explore light, memory, and the emotional architecture of the body.
The Body as Medium and Memory
Born in Riyadh and trained from the age of three in classical dance, Brahim has always been fluent in the language of the body. She pursued formal studies at the London Contemporary Dance School after early training in San Francisco, grounding her practice in somatic awareness and anatomical precision.
But it’s the emotional resonance of her movements - slow, intentional, aching with tenderness - that defines her art. In her cyanotype series Who We Are Out of the Dark, presented at the Lyon Biennale in 2022, Brahim captures ephemeral gestures on deep blue fabric. Each silhouette, a frozen motion, evokes generational trauma and resilience.
“I was thinking about how trauma lives in the body. These movements are inherited, passed down like stories.”
Space as Emotion
Brahim’s work has a haunting spatiality. In her first solo exhibition Sometimes We Are Eternal (2023–2024) at the Bally Foundation in Lugano, Switzerland, she choreographed space as much as she did image.
Dual-channel videos like Adagio and Duet with Time looped in rooms where sculptural fragments and ambient sound merged into an atmosphere of disappearance and return. Presence flickered like breath: fleeting, fragile, and deeply felt.
The exhibition transformed the historic Villa Heleneum into a sanctuary of slowness. Visitors moved through its corridors as though entering a dream: echo, pause, inhale. For Brahim, absence isn’t emptiness but a resonant state.
"After my experience with grief, I find it deeply important to express my reflections to contribute to the lineage of art and culture so that we may find commonplaces of healing both internal and external."
– Sarah Brahim
Dancing in the Sands of Alula
In early 2025, Brahim unveiled NEUMA: The Forgotten Ceremony in the desert expanse of AlUla, a collaboration with French artist Ugo Schiavi. Here, her performative language expanded into architectural form.
Sandblasted glass temples and breathing-activated vessels turned ancient landscapes into contemporary altars. Set across Wadi al-Naam and Dar Tantora, the installation included a film featuring artist Muruj Alemam and her children, threading maternal presence with mythic memory.
The glass, made from local sand, seemed to exhale and inhale, responding to bodily movement. It was an homage to the pre-Islamic rites that once pulsed in these valleys.
Choreography Becomes Cinema
2024 marked a turning point. Brahim was selected for the 77th Locarno Filmmakers Academy, where she debuted Flesh, a new short film extending her choreographic language into cinematic time.
While her past works invited viewers to physically walk through emotional landscapes, Flesh brought that interiority to the screen. A tender unraveling of muscle and memory.
This expansion into film doesn’t signal a departure from performance, but rather a widening of her tools. Whether through dance, fabric, or video, Brahim continues to draw from a well of embodied knowing. Her practice resists categorization, much like the breath it so often references: vital, invisible, ungraspable.
A Global Voice Rooted in Riyadh
Though she now divides her time between Milan and Riyadh, Brahim remains deeply connected to Saudi soil. Her contributions to Noor Riyadh and Diriyah Biennale introduced new modalities of public art, using light and sound to explore collective memory.
Works like Memory Machine and De Anima blurred the lines between architecture and emotion, body and environment.
From Sarah Brahim’s De Anima at Noor Riyadh, projected beneath the arches of Wadi Hanifa.
Earlier performances across the Gulf, Europe, and North America laid the foundation for this global resonance. From solo works at Shubbak Festival to intimate choreographies in Portland, Brahim has long explored how the body mediates silence, rupture, and reconciliation.
Recognitions & Rising Impact
Her recognitions are as layered as her practice. The Locarno Filmmakers Academy selection placed her among an elite cohort of visionary storytellers. In the United States, she received the Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship and the Drinking Gourd Fellowship, highlighting her role in reshaping diasporic and Gulf narratives.
At home, Misk Art Institute has supported her evolution through grants and residencies. These honors mark more than acclaim. They testify to a sustained inquiry. Brahim doesn’t chase visibility. Her art emerges from stillness, from attention. “I think about breath as an archive,” she once said. “We leave traces with every exhale.”
Why It Matters
Sarah Brahim is building a language of remembrance through form. Her work invites us to pause. To inhabit the liminal spaces between ritual and rupture, dance and disappearance.
In a region undergoing vast transformation, she offers something else: slowness, softness, and depth. Through her, Saudi contemporary art finds a new register: not louder, but deeper. Not brighter, but truer.