Born in Sharjah in 1986, Alaa Edris uses photography, film and performance to enact experimental mappings and manipulations of her social and urban environment. Acting as anthropologist, cartographer and sci-fi voyager, she contends with dominant issues from the field of Arab artistic research, including the construction of gender, the relationship between tradition and progress, and language as a medium to identify, shape and articulate a culture. Her background as a photographer and filmmaker is evident across her practice, where individual works act like freeze-frames and provocative vignettes from which dense narratives expand. Observations of her immediate context – the UAE in the late-2010s – are manipulated through more fantastic conduits to realize uncanny dioramas and instigations, uncomfortable in their simultaneous familiarity and distortion. She mines the collective realities of morphing urban environments, the fertile bed of folklore and the forceful semiotics of gender and belief to re-propose and re-purpose the remnants of architecture, myth and social history. Each work acts as a nexus, where her excavation of these collective materials lights imagined, parallel possibilities for re-interpretation and progress – often fantastic yet potent with uncanny familiarity. A graduate Fine Arts from the University of Sharjah, with a concentration in electronic media, Edris’ work has been presented in exhibitions across the region and internationally including Sharjah Biennial 14: ‘Leaving the Echo Chamber’ (SAF Art Spaces, Sharjah, 2019), ‘Tribe: Contemporary Photography from the Arab World’ (American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, DC, USA, 2018), ‘From Barcelona to Abu Dhabi’ – Works from the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) in dialogue with the Emirates (Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi, 2018), ‘Is Old Gold?’ (DUCTAC, Dubai, 2017); ‘Al Haraka Baraka – UAE Unlimited Arab Exploration’ (Maraya Arts Centre, Sharjah, 2016); ‘In the Absence of Script’ (Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, 2014); as part of the touring exhibition ‘Past Forward: Contemporary Art from the Emirates’ (USA, 2014–2016) and Moving Image Art Fair (London, 2013). She graduated from the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship in 2015 and completed a residency at Fondazione Cini in Venice through an award granted by Emirates Foundation in 2011. She currently lives between Abu Dhabi and Sharjah, UAE.