Hajer Al Harrasi

Meet Hajer

Hajer Al Harrasi is an Omani visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice blends various artistic mediums and techniques, embracing contemporary art forms such as conceptual art, conceptual photography, oil painting, video art, and installation.

Her artistic inspiration is drawn from everyday social life and her personal experiences. Her current works are a fusion of her identity as a woman striving to express herself within modern society, and reflections of the emotions, thoughts, and questions that stir within her concerning existence, identity, presence, and absence.

She explores themes of perception, transformation, and the evolving relationship between material and digital artistic expression.

Al Harrasi holds a Master of Arts and a Bachelor’s degree in Art Education from Sultan Qaboos University.

Her work has been exhibited locally and internationally, including:

Sarab, semi-solo exhibition at Al Mouj Muscat;

The 12th Sikka Art and Design Festival in the UAE;

Malath at Nizwa Cultural Center;

Mirrors of Existence at Stal Gallery;

Video Art Forum in Saudi Arabia, where she received a Certificate of Excellence in its 5th edition;

Brightness at Bait Al Zubair;

and Arise at the Royal Opera House of Music in Muscat.

Her evolving practice engages with both tradition and innovation, offering new perspectives on artistic expression while remaining deeply connected to cultural narratives and contemporary discourse.

WHAT INSPIRES ME

My artwork is inspired by daily social life and my own experiences. My current artwork is a mixture of myself as a female artist trying to express herself in contemporary society, and reflections of the emotions, thoughts, and questions of existence, identity, and absence in my body.

I found my sanctuary in art, and it always inspires me to express myself as who I am—telling people what I cannot say in words. I find it interesting how people reflect their feelings and experiences through my work, and this, for me, is the criterion for the success of a work of art. I always strive to search for knowledge and present art with meaning and a solid philosophy that can one day reach global ranks.

In 2020, I began researching the concept of the presence of the body in contemporary art. I looked at experiences in body art and performance art, tracing the body’s presence from ancient times to contemporary art—how it appears philosophically as an absent and present form at the same time. This became the theme of my master’s thesis, as I realized the body had always been present in my work from the beginning.

My current work deals with the concept of the body philosophically, expressing the present and absent body without representing it in full physical form. Through photography, installation, and video art, I developed visual treatments that create depth and extension within this idea.

ARTWORKS

Title: Between Presence and Absence

Between Presence and Absence explores the body as an entity that exceeds its physical form, dissolving into memory, emotion, and lived experience. It drifts between states of being—between presence and absence, the material and the intangible.

Shaped by desire, hope, and fear, the body becomes a vessel onto which we project our most persistent longings. Like an illusion, it appears yet remains out of reach: present but distant, real yet ephemeral. The work unfolds as an invocation of the body’s shifting forms, each revealing the impossibility of fully holding what is already slipping away.

Title: A Body Returning from Memory

Projected onto sheer white fabric within a decayed, timeworn space, A Body Returning from Memory traces how memory distorts and reshapes what remains. The body appears as a hint—an imprint of past selves shaped by pain, longing, and loss. As it lingers, it reaches toward oblivion.

Here, the body hovers between remembrance and forgetting. The space itself becomes a vessel for what remains, summoning what drifts beyond reach. In this convergence of past and present, a question emerges:

Is the body a material memory, or only the shadow of what slips through us?

Title: Echoes of Memory

Echoes of Memory confronts the fragility of memory and its relentless transformation under the weight of time. Memories do not remain intact—they fragment, distort, and slip away, leaving behind incomplete traces.

What was once vivid becomes an illusion: existing yet unreachable. These images capture a presence that is both there and lost, revealing the fleeting nature of recollection. The work dwells in the quiet ache of what escapes us, where remembering is bound to the inevitability of forgetting.

Title: My Estranged Bodies

Emerging from the idea that the body must first feel unfamiliar to be truly known, My Estranged Bodies examines the body as a site of displacement—an entity in perpetual estrangement, expanding and dissolving in response to its surroundings.

Here, the body is transparent, elusive, shaped by the forces around it. It is fluid, rewritten through every moment of alienation. Rather than being defined by what is held, the self forms through what recedes. In every attempt to reclaim the body, it remains in motion—untethered, unreachable, always becoming.

Title: From Existence to Nothingness

Conceptual Photographs, 2023

Our human experience is bound by the duality of existence and perishment. From birth, we are tied to death. We search for a life that reflects our identity and choices—this acceptance of mortality gives life its meaning.

Nothingness is not the absence of life, but a pillar through which life exists. Even if the body perishes, its memory may continue—if one chooses for it to.

In this work, I reach out to my existence-troubled self:

“You gave me every reason for absence until I left. And each time I left, I found myself fulfilled, until existence was incarnated in nothingness.”

This work deals with deep existential questions, reminding us of the transient nature of human life. The phantom of nothingness is always present, revealing our human nature through contemplating existence born from nothingness.

Title: The Cemetery of Oblivion

Installation Art

We often find ourselves stuck between memory and oblivion, realizing that what fades into memory may carry seeds of new beginnings.

I long wished for oblivion, without understanding that forgetting meant surrendering pieces of my soul. Each time I tried to forget, I lost part of myself—caught between the desire to be free from memory and the fear of losing who I am.

The Cemetery of Oblivion is more than a metaphor for forgetting—it manifests the eternal cycle of life and death, where decay and rebirth exist simultaneously. The work invites viewers to contemplate how memory and oblivion both serve as sources of growth and renewal.

Title: Portals of Time

This work engages with the relationship between place and time through fabric as a visual medium that reanimates the historic features of the Al-ʿAqr quarter in Nizwa. The doors are transformed from architectural elements into temporal symbols interlaced with texts from ancient Omani manuscripts.

They become gateways of memory—thresholds not only of space, but of time.

The viewer stands before fractured temporality, where time flows through language, architecture, and collective memory. The doors become portals—not for bodies to cross, but for memories—recasting our human relationship with endurance, loss, and transformation.