Hujra — حُجرة: A Curatorial Essay by Abeer Seikaly

Attunement — “The Dance Is Still”

“The dance is still,” Miramar says, as her hands move through an unseen field where frequency meets matter. “When the physical and non-physical align, the heart opens, and receiving begins. The body becomes a vessel of flow, dancing to unheard melodies, while the hands inscribe traces before words, before essence is translated into language, before meaning divides.” Through this meeting, painting happens as an experience where frequency acts as conductor.

This sensitivity began early. As a child, Miramar sensed paradoxes through her hands that her mind could not yet describe: weight beside weightlessness, closeness beside distance. These pairings created a world where opposites shared the same space. Over time, this sensitivity grew into a method: stillness opened the point of entry, frequency initiated the impulse, and the hand registered what arrived. From this constellation, the work takes form.

Hujra (حُجرة) and Hajar (حَجَر) — Chamber, Stone, and the Birth of Inner Experience

Hujra (حُجرة), meaning “chamber” in Arabic, shares its root with hajar (حَجَر), “stone.” Between chamber and stone lies the core of Al Nayyar’s practice: the birth of inner experience into the material realm.

A chamber within a chamber within a chamber: the rock as an elemental companion emitting frequency into being; the body as a vessel vibrating with its resonance, transmitting it into form and color; the studio as mirror where this reflection becomes visible. Through these chambers, the work finds its orientation. Each chamber opens a stage of the process — the first sensation, the first movement, the first emergence of color.

She attunes to the rock through frequency. “The first thing I take from the rock is its frequency. The color is its temperature,” she says. The impulse enters as a dance, lifts into tone, and appears on the surface as form. She awakens each painting by casting light from the top right corner, like a sun rising over form.

Ground and Script — The Language of Material

Material defines the terrain through which frequency becomes visible. Acrylic mixed with calcium carbonate forms a chalk-like, porous ground. Airbrushing pigment disperses into air before settling, casting shadows that mirror the way light becomes visible in nature. “Air gives body to light,” she writes, revealing atmosphere as an active participant in formation. Pigment arrives like dust carried by a breeze, creating transitions that resemble the faint shifts of dawn or the slow settling of desert sand.

Script threads through some of the works. Miramar describes script “as words giving life to flesh, like blood flowing through veins.” Layer upon layer, ground and script interlace, animated by the vitality that circulates through being. Script appears as a proto-language, arriving before meaning, like early carvings etched into rock.

The layering of materials resembles an embryo: complete as a code from the start, revealed gradually, membrane by membrane. Painting becomes “a journey of excavation,” unveiling what already exists in wholeness.

Myths of Origin — Chambers of the Inner Psyche

Miramar’s practice draws from states where perception sharpens and images arrive with clarity. States of exhaustion, overflow, or suspension between waking and sleep loosen the surface self, creating passageways through which the unconscious flows. 

One vision appeared in Zurich, Switzerland, while she walked around an imagined circle at the home of Carl Gustav Jung. She recalls:

“Within the void behind my eyelids, I have seen a serpent rising at the center of the circle. I experienced a living mandala before I even knew what a mandala was. From two lotus flowers, I witnessed the alchemical formation of a serpent from empty wombs of the lotus — a cycle of creation unfolding in stillness, while on the outside I was rotating around my center.”  

This vision formed an inner anatomy of movement: emergence, formation, ascent, and embodiment. Only later, did she discover that Jung had drawn similar constellations of serpent, flower, and circle — though her encounter arrived first as experience, long before it found interpretation.

Another vision appeared in the desert. Meditating on a rock, she sensed  a ringing in her ears, her eyes closing, and her hands lifting as if tuning themselves to an unseen frequency. She entered a tunnel of stone and arrived at a hujra (حُجرة), a chamber, where a sun radiated from within. These visions arise from the collective unconscious: archetypal images that appear across cultures with inexhaustible force. They inscribe themselves before words and guide the hand as revelation and record.

They also opened her inquiry into script as a pre-verbal field — language as sound, impulse, and movement before interpretation, resonant forms of glossolalia described as a first language that predates meaning. Script appears in her work as recognition rather than translation, an imprint of what arrives before thought.

Dhikr (ذِكر) — Repetition as Return

“الإنسان من النسيان لأنه خُلق ليتذكّر”

As Miramar believes and Sufi teachers write: the human emerges from forgetting and moves toward remembrance.

To be human, insan (إنسان) is to move through nisyan (نسيان)—a state where forgetting opens the path toward dhikr (ذِكر), remembrance as return. In Sufi thought, dhikr (ذِكر) is a turning of being toward its source, a vibration that renews inner life.

Dhikr manifests in Miramar’s process through repetition. Each gesture turns towards its origin, and each movement completes the cycle it begins. “It’s a cycle where movement and stillness coexist,” she says. The circle becomes a lived mandala — the nearest path to the source, where beginning and end meet in a single motion. Through this circulation, the painting forms its internal architecture, awakening a moving stillness that hums beneath the visible. 

For Miramar, the painting functions as a device. It stirs perception in the way that organic sandstone formations in Al Baidha (البيضاء), a Nabataean valley near Petra, Jordan, seem to morph before the eye. In that landscape, forms seem to advance and recede, while the true transformation unfolds inside the observer. What begins as a recognizable image dissolves into a state beyond recognition, drawing vision toward its source. Time stretches, space widens, and consciousness opens into another register. The painting acts as an instrument of this passage, guiding the viewer along the same movement her hand follows.

Through dhikr, each layer remembers its origin. The embryo becomes a guiding metaphor, already whole and revealed through emergence. Form arrives in harmony with its code, guided by frequency and its vibration.

The Desert as Horizon

The desert forms the symbolic horizon of this practice.  Across ancient traditions, it was the landscape of withdrawal, where seekers encountered visions on the journey toward their soul. For Miramar, the horizon remains vital: the desert is both a reservoir of time and a field of revelation. 

The rock becomes a conduit of the ancestral psyche, constellating frequencies the hand receives, slowing into sound, movement, and image, like light refracted through glass into endless colors. “The hands can read the rock better than any part of the body,” she says. The rock gathers mineral time and elemental frequency, opening pathways for remembrance and formation.

The Exhibition as Hujra

Everything converges on the canvas. Each painting becomes a hujra (حُجرة), a chamber of emergence where impulses received through the body take material form. Miramar describes each one as a hujra, a hajara — a device that stirs perception and shifts consciousness toward an earlier state, where human and nature move as one.

The paintings activate the same inner movement one senses before sandstone formations in the desert: a soft unlayering of vision, an opening toward what lies beneath perception. Each surface becomes a site of return — a passage inward toward the source that animates it.

Within the exhibition, these works settle into a single field. Light moves across their surfaces as across stone. The viewer enters this field as one enters a chamber, sensing the continuity Miramar inhabits, from inner frequency into visible form.

“The dance is still, and everything moves within it.”