+ About the work

Harri with headphones (2019) pictures a young woman listening to music. This portrait draws on mystical approaches to portraiture - that can be found in the Scandinavian school of paintings - where the sitter seems to be transported into another realm.

Harri with headphones shows the central position of photography and sound in relation to current debates around realism, illusionism and authorship.

+ About the artist

Sarah Dobai’s work is based in photography, extending into film and performance.

Her book The Overcoat, brought out by the celebrated artist publisher Four Corners Books, is based on Nikolai Gogol’s classic novella juxtasposed with Dobai's photographs of commercial vitrines in contemporary London and Paris. The photographs explore display and presentation, adding to the pleasures and confusions of surface appearance, that figure in the famous novella and on the streets of our cities.

Dobai’s exhibitions and projects include the Bees in a Hive of Glass, performance at Whitstable Biennale with novelist Tom McCarthy. Her work is shown and collected internationally including FotoMuseum Antwerp, Belgium; FotoMuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, OR Gallery Vancouver and Whitechapel Gallery London.