Isthmus Ancient River functions poetically through dream logic and submerged histories. The work begins with the protagonist awakening in a cave, drawing on The Seven Sleepers of the Cave: in Quran Surah 18, later echoed in Christian tradition, a group of persecuted young men hid in a cave around 250 AD, fell into a miraculous sleep believing it would last only a day, and awoke roughly 300 years later. The work’s strength lies in how it transforms colonial archives into fluid memory spaces. Through sacred dance, butterfly migrations and landscape, the moving image installation treats the environment itself as an epistemic system, resisting fixed historical narration and linear understandings of time. It behaves as an oneiric counter-archive in which memory, mythology and ecology remain in constant circulation. This is politically significant because empire depends upon stabilised narratives, mapped borders and linear histories. Here, dreaming becomes a resistant structure: a way of holding histories in motion beyond the administrative logic of colonial record keeping.
Said Nursi (1877–1960), the Kurdish Islamic scholar and author of the six-thousand-page Risale-i Nur commentary on the Qur’an, described time as something generated through the movement of celestial bodies. In his reflections on metaphysical time, he proposed that all beings enter existence from the future, pause briefly in the present, and then flow into the past, forming what he called the river of time. As he writes: “What we call time, a mighty river flowing in creation, has a reality like everything else. Its reality is like the ink and pages of the writing of Power on the Tablet of Effacement and Reaffirmation. Only God knows the Unseen.” (Tenth Letter, p.59). In this view, every moment of time is not merely a measurement but a stage of creation itself, unfolding continuously under the divine command: “Be, and it is.” (Qur’an 2:117).
Isthmus Ancient River by Sarah Al Sarraj sits between a narrative film and a gameplay. Viewers are invited to follow an Ancestor Simulation on a journey down the river of time, witnessing the remnants and ruins of their descendants. From the distant future to the present, they encounter a radioactive waste isolation plant-turned-temple, centuries of ecological adaptation and the long term impacts of environmental violence, until they meet the present, represented as a dam in the river.
This work as will all my comissions expands my curatorial research into Carib Cosmology and the Poetics of Touch, asking how worlds are sensed, rendered, and remembered through the body. In this work, the river becomes a temporal corridor rather than a geographical one; a current through which past, present, and future drift into proximity. Time is not treated as a linear measure but as a material that can fold, pool, and erode, much like water shaping a landscape. Within Carib cosmology, knowledge does not emerge solely from vision or abstraction. It is carried through touch, rhythm, and proximity; through bodies moving together, skin to skin, breath to breath.
The Poetics of Touch names this sensory intelligence; a form of relational knowing where information passes between bodies, environments, and spirits through gesture, pressure, vibration, and movement. Touch becomes a form of communication older than language, and perhaps closer to truth. In this sense the brain can be understood as amachine that renders reality, assembling sensory signals into the world we believe we inhabit. Light striking the retina, vibrations reaching the ear, the pressure of ground beneath the feet; all are translated by neural processes into coherent experience. Reality is therefore not simply given; it is continually composed by the nervous system.
Isthmus Ancient River works within this premise and more. Built in a game engine yet guided by cosmological storytelling, it proposes that digital environments can function as ritual spaces for recalibrating perception. The viewer travels along a river of time where historical violence, ecological collapse, and ancestral memory converge. What appears as landscape is also cognition; the environment mirrors the processes through which the brain stitches fragments of information into narrative and meaning.
By situating this journey within Carib cosmology, the work suggests another model of perception. Instead of the detached observer central to Western epistemology, knowledge emerges through contact; through bodies, territories, and ancestral presences meeting in shared space. The river becomes both metaphor and mechanism, carrying information between worlds. In this way Isthmus Ancient River treats the digital not as a simulation of reality but as a cosmotechnic instrument; a way of exploring how perception, memory, and cosmology might be reconfigured. The viewer does not simply watch the world unfold. They move within a current of relations, where time behaves like water and reality is something continuously rendered between mind, body, and earth.
Biography
Sarah Al-Sarraj (b. 1997) is a visual artist and cultural worker based between Pittsburgh (US) and London (UK). Her work centers on worldbuilding as a creative and critical process, where painting and immersive technologies are understood as portals to other worlds. Predicated on the belief that our world was designed in service of imperial violence, she builds new lifeworlds rooted in land, spirit, and ancestry. Currently working with game engines, she is interested in appropriating military simulation technologies to build uncolonisable realms inspired by Global Majority knowledge systems and emerging quantum thought. 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. In 2022, her comic book ‘Sinkhole’ was selected for New Contemporaries. In 2023, she received a grant from Arts Council England to develop an animation practice, through which she began collaborating with the Mechatronic Library, a collective of intersectional feminist worldbuilders and immersive artists. Her first solo show opened at Two Queens Gallery in 2024 and she has since held solo presentations of her work at Mimosa House, the World Museum, and Longsight Art Space. 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 recently selected as a finalist for the CIRCA Prize 2025. She is currently undertaking her MFA at Carnegie Mellon University.
