DOHA.- Carbon 12 will participate in the first edition of Art Basel Qatar with a solo booth by Emirati artist, Sarah Almehairi. In line with the fair’s open format, the artist presents a In Folded Space, a new project that plays off her Off Centered series as she continues to explore abstraction as a language attuned to flux and expands her investigation into language and structure. Voids and intervals are as significant as form, suggesting that meaning emerges as much from absence as from presence.

Through a constellation of wooden frames and gridded forms that lean, rest, and intersect across the booth, these modular units echo architectural fragments yet resist firm closure. Rather, they fold into one another and the surrounding space. Within the theme of Becoming, the work reflects on layered sites of transformation, whether as a person, as a space, or as a region, where histories are continually inscribed and reinscribed.

Almehairi treats the frame as both boundary and passage: a mark of containment, but also an opening toward multiplicity. Here, systems appear only to be unsettled, while structures give way to fragility and permeability. In Folded Space invites viewers to inhabit a shifting terrain where the act of change becomes a meditation on continuity, rupture, and renewal.

The body of work is one that resists singular definition, taking form through the way it is installed and reconfigured throughout the space. On one wall, 24 interconnected panels (60 × 40 cm each) create a shifting field where intentional marks traverse across surfaces, binding fragments into a larger whole. The panels act as both independent units and parts of a larger organism, suggesting a system in flux, where permanance and transience coexist, shaping the work’s rhythm and extending its dialogue into the surrounding architecture.

This configuration gives way to a second work on the adjacent wall, where the form re-emerges: shifted, fractured, reassembled as a ramp-like structure. Finally, the system extends onto the larger floor-based structure, which introduces dimensionality and spatial weight. Through these evolving configurations, Almehairi emphasizes process over permanence: form is not singular, but in continual negotiation with space, architecture, and the act of making.

Almehairi’s works act as propositions rather than conclusions, gestures of folding, accumulation, and reconfiguration that mirror broader systems of becoming. Within the layered context of the Gulf, they resonate as abstractions of transformation, where surfaces become structures and structures, in turn, become spaces.