Hassan Sharif used disregarded materials and objects sourced from his local environment to create sculptures bearing the accumulation of his repetitive movements—weaving, knotting, tying, binding. Improvisational yet focused and mundane, his method yielded works that recast the flotsam and jetsam of rampant consumerism: they are excerpted from their commercial flows and emporia—bound, pinned, suspended—and held up both as cautionary remark and absurdist gesture.

One of Sharif's most celebrated bodies of work, known as his Objects or Urban Archaeology, explores this economic change ripping through the Emirates by foregrounding the commodities purchased throughout his life, spanning the ever-expanding index of products from Dubai’s shops and markets. Duchamp’s taste for life’s absurdity, characterized by an affinity for the least desirable ready-made articles as potential artworks, reverberates in Spare Parts. The sculptures examine the proliferation of global commodities and the values they hold, representing them in arrangements that are almost senseless, often suggestive of flickering futility at the base of globalized production and consumption.

The gesture of isolating the spare part, somehow divorcing it from its wider machine whole, intensifies an underlying examination of consumer need and commodity value. The “spare” parts are required at a moment when the machine malfunctions; they intervene to restore order. Debilitated by their copper-wire bondage, splayed in an ironically regimented constellation across the wall, the pieces’ restorative functions are undermined—a wry stab by Sharif at the very promise of order and system.