Growing up as part of the Arab diaspora and often feeling torn between worlds, artist Sarah Al-Sarraj felt it was comforting to view our identities not only as a product of everything that has come before, but as a merging of our past, present and future, an idea she’s visualized in her latest series, “Separated by Millennia.” Through large-scale paintings, Al-Sarraj builds a new world centered around a mythical, nomadic tribe, separated by thousands of years but still very much connected. She tells Dalia Al-Dujaili how she hopes to show the actions of our ancestors are not lost, but embedded in us, and in turn to help us realize the impact we, as individuals, can have on our world, and on those who come after us.
Sarah Al-Sarraj’s creative practice revolves around the concept of world-building—the act of creating systems inspired by pre-colonial and ancient thinking, whether political, ecological or cultural. Her work is grounded in the social justice movements she’s been part of, from Healing Justice London to working within Palestinian political advocacy, as well as supporting young asylum seekers. But it’s also deeply speculative, drawing on science fiction, futurisms and the belief that art can offer us a new lens through which to understand the world.
Her latest series, “Separated by Millennia,” opened at Two Queens Gallery, Leicester, presented as part of the Arab British Centre’s “As We Are, Might Have Been and Could Be” visual arts program, which explores the idea of Arab Britishness through artist commissions and community projects, curated by Jessica El-Mal.
A poignant theme in Al-Sarraj’s work is the idea of bifocality—the experience of being in two places at once, both physically and emotionally, which grew out of her own experience as part of the Arab diaspora. “I started thinking about the creation of new identities, new worlds,” she tells me. “Thinking about the immigrant experience as a kind of a teleportation between worlds. And then I started specifically thinking about time, and about how different societies and communities have held time or have reckoned time and how it has something to do with their way of understanding the world.” She sees identity as being forged not by looking back to one place or another, but by connecting the past, present and future.
For Al-Sarraj, time is a powerful and often overlooked force. The Western conception of time—linear, measured, standardized—has roots in colonial history, embedded in systems like Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which she says was developed to support colonial expansion. Al-Sarraj is rethinking time beyond the colonial clock. In 1884, GMT became the global standard, erasing other ways of marking time and ordering the world. Al-Sarraj, however, is more interested in cyclical, nature-based conceptions of time—like those found in Islamic and indigenous cultures, where time is not a linear progression, but a series of interconnected cycles.
Al-Sarraj’s vision of time is realized most fully in “Separated by Millenia,” which depicts an epic love story set not in space, but in time. Al-Sarraj imagines a nomadic tribe as a community deeply connected to the natural world, one that understands time as a fluid, cyclical force. The narrative follows two characters from the tribe who are separated by thousands of years. One becomes a descendant, the other an ancestor, embodying the complex, often painful relationship we have with our forebears and our descendants. In the partner paintings titled “7000 Gaits Apart,” we see the characters looking up at the same star several thousand years apart, jarring our short-sighted human perception of time.
This story almost demands that we somehow honor both our ancestors and our descendants, beckoning us to ask “how we do right by our descendants and how we can bring about some kind of understanding of intergenerational justice,” says Al-Sarraj. In many ways, her work is an invitation to think about how we relate to those who’ve shaped us, and how we, in turn, will shape the future.
Al-Sarraj’s paintings bring these themes to life through a rich tapestry of symbolism. Each painting is a deep, layered puzzle of time, history and science. In the centerpiece landscape, “The Dog Tooth of Time,” she imagines a sunrise ritual for a tribe mourning the extinction of a lion species, reflecting the loss of the Barbary lion which was once endemic to Iraq, too, but became extinct in 1918. The scene reflects the phenomenon which destabilizes an entire ecosystem known as a “trophic cascade.” The image is rich with symbolism, drawing on themes of survival, ecological loss and the tribe’s deep connection to time.
One painting proposes a quiet break from the dramatizations of time travel—two characters face four monarch butterflies. This butterfly undertakes an extraordinary four-generation migration between the northern US and Mexico. This journey is encoded in the butterflies’ DNA, with each generation completing a leg of the trip, a process both awe-inspiring and mysterious. Al-Sarraj recounts how the monarchs make an arc over Lake Superior, preserving a flight pattern that once curved around an ancient mountain that has long since eroded. This phenomenon reflects an intergenerational memory embedded in their lineage, embodying a connection to past landscapes.
The butterfly asks us to rethink our relationship to time and to the land. As Al-Sarraj says, “we think of geology as being fixed and as the earth being so old and us having such an insignificant kind of experience on earth. But there’s just something so beautiful about the idea of these [butterfly] lineages and having a sense of orienting and moving through the world that is their intergenerational memory. It’s so embodied within them.”
Sarah Al-Sarraj, a trustee at the Inclusive Mosque Initiative, collaborated with the New Crescent Society, which conducts moon-sighting traditions in the UK, on the project. She embraces an interpretation of Islam, inspired by Sufi thought, that connects spirituality with nature, seeing the natural world as a reflection of the divine. Al-Sarraj believes Islam is not monolithic but evolves through diverse cultural contexts, referencing books like “Qur’an of the Oppressed” and “Green Deen” that explore Islam’s role in social justice and environmentalism. Her interest in the Sufi tale “Hayy ibn Yaqzan,” where a child gains enlightenment through nature, echoes a view of Islam that intertwines science and spirituality—a legacy of the Islamic Golden Age. In her art, she depicts ecological practices rooted in spirituality, resonating with her own multifaceted identity shaped by life in diverse communities like Leicester, where cultural adaptations foster connections to her Iraqi-Muslim heritage.
In “Separated by Millennia,” Al-Sarraj asks us to consider the connections between the past, present and future. She challenges us to think about our role in the ongoing story of the world—not just as passive observers, but as active participants who can create a more just, sustainable and interconnected world. In a time of deep uncertainty, Al-Sarraj offers us a vision of hope that draws on the wisdom of the past, the urgency of the present and the possibility of a better future.