Fragmented Realities

Hadeer Omar’s Fragmented Realities presents an immersive audiovisual video of an installation that probes the porous margins between memory and dreams, anchoring the viewer within an ephemeral space where reality blurs into introspection. Engaging with sensory experience as a vehicle for artistic expression, Omar challenges traditional understandings of dreamscapes by reconfiguring them as dynamic environments shaped by sound, space, and time. Her projections, cast upon undulating forms such as mounds of pillows, evoke the intimate setting of the bedroom – a site of vulnerability and subconscious navigation. In this way, Omar establishes a multisensory landscape in which private reveries are externalized and shared, foregrounding the role of the body and its senses in the aesthetic encounter. Her work resonates with the surrealist tradition, particularly the investigations of artists like Salvador Dalí and Remedios Varo, who rendered dreams not as mere escapes from reality but as complex matrices of meaning, emotion, and psychic revelation.

Omar’s engagement with personal narratives further amplifies the relational dimension of the installation. By gathering dream accounts from diverse individuals, she constructs a collective memoryscape that embodies both specificity and universality. This participatory element repositions the audience not as passive viewers but as co-creators, where art becomes a platform for human interaction and shared experience. In Fragmented Realities, the dialogue between artist and audience is central: the artwork itself is contingent upon the viewer’s immersion, evoking a duet between individual perception and collective imagination. The interplay of light, sound, and tactile environment fosters a liminal state, recalling Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space – a phenomenological exploration of how intimate environments (such as the bedroom) become sites for poetic and imaginative experience. Omar’s work, then, becomes a space of resonance,