Daybed, 2026
Biography
Sarah Al-Sarraj (b. 1997, Leicester, UK) is a British-Iraqi visual artist, cultural worker and polymath whose multidisciplinary practice centres on worldbuilding as a creative and critical process. Working across painting, moving image, performance and 3D technologies, she appropriates military simulation technologies (game engines) to build uncolonisable realms inspired by Global Majority cosmologies. These speculative worlds explore our relationship to the natural world through interspecies encounters and desires, while rejecting notions of purity through an embrace of contamination as both an ecological condition and a postcolonial reality. Woven through these worlds are mythologies of survival within an increasingly mutated and militarised environment.
Her creative practice is informed by years of movement building, at organisations such as Forensic Architecture, the Inclusive Mosque Initiative and Healing Justice London. She is inspired by the tangible material potential of visionary practice in global liberation movements and she occasionally lends her hands to illustration for various groups.
Al-Sarraj has shown her work in the UK and internationally. Her comic book ‘Sinkhole’ was selected for New Contemporaries in 2022. She is a recipient of Arts Council England’s DYCP grant (2022) and Project Grants (2025, 2026). She frequently collaborates with the Mechatronic Library, a collective of intersectional feminist worldbuilders and immersive artists making magic. She has held solo presentations of her work at Two Queens Gallery (2024), Mimosa House, the World Museum, Longsight Art Space (2025), and Eastside Projects (2026). In an attempt to broaden the scope of her work, she has given presentations at the UK’s National Space Centre and the World Museum. She was selected as a finalist for the CIRCA Prize 2025.
Libra - Scorpio - Leo
فَقَالُوا۟ عَلَى ٱللَّهِ تَوَكَّلْنَا رَبَّنَا لَا تَجْعَلْنَا فِتْنَةً لِّلْقَوْمِ ٱلظَّـٰلِمِينَ ٨٥
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CIRCA Prize 2025