Safia Hamidat

Safia’s practice explores the transformative properties of materials activated by light in space.

Using industrial and organic materials — including aluminium chain, perspex, and dyed textiles — she investigates tensions between materiality and fabrication, whether shaped by hand or machine. Hardness and softness, opacity and translucency, structure and fragility remain central to the work.

Photography plays an important role within her process, particularly images of reflections, windows, curtains, gates, and transitional architectural surfaces. Screens, partitions, and suspended forms echo these visual cues, recurring as semi-permeable architectures that choreograph movement and perception within space.

These observations are translated through layering, repetition, and surface manipulation, in which industrial materials are softened by fabric and gesture. Repetition functions as both ritual and labour, with cutting, sanding, drilling, sewing, and construction becoming integral to the work’s development.

Influenced by Giuliana Bruno’s writing on screen materiality, Safia approaches installation as a form of drawing and painting in space. More recently, sound has extended the work into multisensory environments that explore atmosphere, immersion, and the relationship and interconnectedness of body, architecture, and perception.