Biography

Sarah Al-Sarraj (b. 1997, Leicester, UK) is a British-Iraqi visual artist and cultural worker 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 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 working in movements, 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 and graphic design for various groups.

Al-Sarraj has shown her work in the UK and internationally. Her comic book ‘Sinkhole’ was selected for New Contemporaries. She has received a DYCP and Project Grant from Arts Council England. She frequently collaborates with the Mechatronic Library, a collective of intersectional feminist worldbuilders and immersive artists. She held solo presentations 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.