Sara Masinaei
Sara is a 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 of Dubai (2004) and an MA from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2011).
Bāqi
In Bāqi, meaning “remaining” or “enduring” in Farsi, Sara Masinaei explores what persists through cycles of life, loss and renewal. Drawing on embodied practices associated with women in mourning, celebration and ritual, particularly across the Gulf region, the performance unfolds through a series of abstracted movements and gestures shaped by memory, repetition and transformation.
Accompanying these movements is a layered soundscape of fragments drawn from regional traditions, including songs and rhythms associated with birth, mourning and rebirth. Together, body and sound become vessels of collective memory, carrying gestures and traditions across generations. Rather than understanding resilience as a moment of triumph or resolution, Bāqi considers it as an ongoing practice of continuation. Through the repetition and transformation of inherited gestures, Masinaei reminds us that even amid loss and uncertainty, something remains and is carried forward.
