Separated by Millennia

11th - 26th October 2024

Two Queens Gallery, Leicester

All photography by Jules Lister

Separated by Millennia is a body of work exploring notions of survival, deep time, ancestry and ecology. Through a series of paintings on wooden panels, you are invited to follow the story of a mythical tribe of temporal nomads who work to preserve biodiversity, travelling not through space but through time. The paintings follow the tribe’s journey from living in relative harmony to their fracture and separation across timescapes, with the resultant Descendants and Ancestors longing for each other across thousands of years. 

Al-Sarraj researches areas of Islamic astronomy, seasonality, and native knowledge systems to construct and imagine new worlds. The world constructed in this exhibition is one of these imaginaries; one where ancestral knowledge is used to steward the natural world, and power is used out of love for the other.

Situated within an ancestral assemblage where we are duty bound to those who came before us, Al-Sarraj’s work asks, how can we bring about intergenerational justice for those yet to come?

Separated By Millennia was co-commissioned by The Arab British Centre, as part of their As We Are, Might Have Been and Could Be visual arts programme, and Shubbak. Curated by Jessica El Mal.

Exhibited Works

Public Programme

Separated by Millennia: In Conversation with Helen Starr, Art/Work Association, Auto Italia

7 – 8PM, 12th November, 2024

In the foreword to Never Whistle at Night, an Indigenous horror anthology, author Stephen Graham Jones reflects on settler land dispossession, asking: “So you took all that land you could see. But what about all this other territory you don’t even know about?” This question speaks to how, within many Global Majority cosmologies and ontological systems, alternate realms offer ways to understand erased histories, identities, and experiences. Spaces we cultivate—whether offline, online, in the Dreaming, the “third space,” or ancestral and spirit worlds—not only enable us to narrate our experiences but also act as counter-cartographies, reshaping how we view the world and resist ongoing oppressions.

The virtual realm is one such space that Global Majority artists are increasingly exploring to centre previously marginalised experiences and knowledge systems, adapting digital tools not designed for us to tell stories that help reshape our world.

Press

Sarah Al-Sarraj: Paintings Imagining New Worlds, We Presents, 2024

World Picks from the Editors: October, Markaz Review, 2024

Islamic Astronomy in the UK’s National Space Centre, The National, 2024