Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: there is a young Libyan artist in contemporary art who refuses easy certainties, preferring to weave her language in the interstices where textile and architecture, memory and displacement meet. Nour Jaouda, born in 1997, works between London and Cairo, creating tapestries and installations that question notions of place, identity, and spirituality with rare acuity. Her work, presented at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 and currently exhibited at Spike Island (Bristol) until January 2026, raises essential questions about what it means to inhabit the contemporary world in a state of perpetual mobility.
Poetry as a map of exile
Jaouda’s work finds one of its deepest anchors in the Palestinian poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. The three tapestries presented in Venice are directly inspired by Darwish’s personification of olive trees, these trees embodying both rootedness and dispossession. Darwish wrote from a position of exile, seeking a portable homeland in poetic language. Jaouda does the same with textile, creating what she calls “a landscape of memory that exists in a liminal space.” The reference to her grandmother’s fig trees in Benghazi, materialized in Where the fig tree cannot be fenced (2023), extends this meditation on the tree as a metaphor for impossible belonging. The vegetal forms are deconstructed until almost unrecognizable, condensed into a landscape of layered greens where the gaps function as poetic silences.
What is remarkable is how Jaouda translates poetic syntax into textile vocabulary. Each cut, each assembly, each dye works as a materialized metaphor. The postcolonial theorists Edward Said and Stuart Hall, whom Jaouda cites as intellectual influences, analyzed how cultural identity forms fluidly rather than fixedly. Jaouda adopts this theoretical perspective but transposes it into the realm of the sensible, creating works that literally embody this process of becoming. Her textiles do not represent identity; they perform it.
The Lebanese writer Etel Adnan, from whom Jaouda quotes, “geographical places become spiritual concepts” [1], offers another point of anchor. Adnan, who also lived between several languages and geographies, understood that displacement is not only physical but ontological. Places become concepts, maps become meditations. Dust that never settles (2024), with its oceanic blues and blending greens, materializes this idea of a geography that refuses to settle. The slowness of the creation process, vegetable dye that takes twenty-four hours to impregnate the fabric, then another twenty-four hours to dry, imposes a meditative temporality close to that of poetic writing. Every fold of the fabric carried in suitcases becomes an integral part of the work, a material inscription of the journey, a tactile archive of displacement.
Architecture as the threshold of the sacred
If poetry provides the conceptual framework, it is architecture that formally structures Jaouda’s work. Her interest in the Egyptian architect AbdelWahed El-Wakil, known for his use of vernacular architecture and divine geometry, is no coincidence. El-Wakil advocated the idea that buildings do not need to be permanent. This vision finds a direct echo in Jaouda’s practice, for whom textiles can be rolled up, transported, and reinstalled in new contexts.
The installation Before the Last Sky (2025), presented at the Islamic Art Biennale, is an example of this approach. The work includes three large tapestries hung from the ceiling and flowing down to the floor, representing the postures of Islamic prayer, sujud, ruqu’ and julus. These textiles are suspended from deconstructed metal portals, creating a reversal of perspective: the doors descend from the sky rather than rising from the ground. The installation uses the motifs of Islamic crenellations, those ornamental architectural forms that crown mosques. The crenellations interest Jaouda because they constitute a liminal space, alternating solids and voids, earth and sky, material and spiritual. She focuses on the negative spaces between the crenellations, creating meaning from what is absent. This approach reveals a sophisticated understanding of Islamic aesthetics, which avoids figurative representation to express the divine through geometric repetition.
The prayer rug, a recurring form in Jaouda’s work, constitutes her quintessential architectural paradigm. This piece of ordinary textile becomes a sacred space through the act of prayer. It creates a temporary “third space,” a threshold that can be deployed anywhere. This portability of the sacred resonates deeply with the experience of mobility that characterizes the artist’s life. The steel structures she incorporates, portals and arches recovered from Cairo markets, function as architectural skeletons. They create a structure without interrupting the space, inviting the viewer to move around and through. For The Shadow of every tree at Art Basel 2024, Jaouda built a large steel portal that extended across the entire width of the space, forcing visitors to cross this threshold. The portal refused direct access while inviting exploration.
This attention to structures that organize space without partitioning it recalls the mashrabiyas, those pierced wooden screens that allow one to see without being seen. Jaouda’s textiles function similarly: they create spaces but remain permeable. The installation The iris grows on both sides of the fence (2025) at Spike Island, designed as a tent in collaboration with artisans from Chariah-el-Khayamia in Cairo, creates a place of collective mourning for uprooted landscapes. The choice of the Faqqua iris, Palestine’s national flower, to adorn this tent is not accidental. This flower, a symbol of resistance and hope, grows on both sides of the barrier. Jaouda’s textile architecture refuses binary divisions: it creates spaces where multiple histories, multiple geographies coexist. Her works are neither paintings nor sculptures; they inhabit the in-between, refusing rigid classifications.
The process as philosophy
Jaouda’s creative process philosophically embodies her vision. She begins by sketching the geometric and organic shapes she encounters: lattices of Cairene mosques, floral motifs, Victorian architectural elements. These flat shapes are transformed into objects that she cuts, molds, tears, reconstructs, and sews. The vocabulary she uses is revealing: “deconstruction,” “destruction,” “detachment.” This paradoxical approach, building through deconstruction, is justified by the postcolonial thinkers she mentions. Hall and Said have demonstrated that cultural identities are fluidly formed through movement.
Plant dyeing, a slow and unpredictable process, gives pigments their own agency. The colors infiltrate the fibers, transforming the materiality of the fabric. In Cairo, her works are adorned with warm yellows, deep blues. In London, the colors cool down, dull greens, browns, purples. Color becomes a language that surpasses verbal language. This nomadic practice physically inscribes displacement into the work. Jaouda asserts that this “rootless existence” [2] is at the heart of her research. The works possess the rare quality of being simultaneously complete and unfinished. This indeterminacy reflects the artist’s conviction that cultural identity is “a constant process of becoming” [3]. The textiles have neither beginning nor end; they partake in a continuity that surpasses the individual object.
Dwelling in the in-between
At the end of this exploration, what should one take away? Jaouda’s work resists simplifications, refuses clear affiliations, cultivates productive ambiguity. The coherence between her conceptual approach and her material implementation is striking: mobility is not a theme she illustrates, it is the very condition of her practice. The textiles that fold, are transported, are reinstalled literally embody the idea of a portable identity. The prayer rug that creates a sacred space wherever it is laid becomes a metaphor for this possibility of carrying one’s place, one’s history with oneself.
In a world where migratory flows intensify, where millions of people live between several countries, several languages, several cultures, Jaouda’s work offers a model to conceive this condition not as a deficit but as a richness, as the capacity to inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously. The spiritual dimension deserves emphasis. In a contemporary art milieu often allergic to religious questions, Jaouda fully assumes this dimension without falling into pious illustration. Her interest in Islamic prayer, in sacred spaces, does not stem from a defensive identity approach but from a sincere inquiry into what constitutes a sacred place.
The poetic quality of her works, this ability to condense complex realities into evocative rather than descriptive forms, distinguishes them from certain conceptual art that prioritizes discourse over sensory experience. Jaouda’s textiles operate on several levels: they can be appreciated for their formal beauty, their sumptuous colors; but they also offer deeper readings for those willing to slow down. This polysemy is a strength. It would be tempting to see in this work a simple reaction to the contemporary geopolitical crisis. That would reduce it. Certainly, the presence of the Palestinian iris, the title Before the Last Sky which references Said, the reference to the fig trees of Benghazi root the work in tragic current events. But Jaouda rejects art as a direct illustration of the political. She operates on a subtler level, creating spaces where beauty and mourning can coexist.
What makes her work necessary is this ability to maintain complexity, to resist binary simplifications. In an era where discourses feed on sharp divisions, us versus them, here versus there, Jaouda proposes forms that deliberately inhabit the intermediate space. Her textiles are neither Eastern nor Western, neither traditional nor contemporary. They exist in this “neither nor” space that is also an “and and,” affirming the possibility of multiple belongings. Jaouda’s work reminds us that art is not meant to provide definitive answers but to keep essential questions open. What does it mean to belong to a place when one lives between multiple worlds? How to carry one’s culture without fixing it as folklore? How to create the sacred? How to build through deconstruction?
These questions traverse her textiles without ever resolving into comfortable certainties. It is precisely this productive tension, this precarious balance between rooting and uprooting, presence and absence, material and spiritual that makes her work strong. In a century that promises to be dominated by migrations, where the question of what it means to have or not have a place will arise with increasing acuity, Jaouda’s work offers much more than an aesthetic reflection. It proposes a mode of existence, a way of inhabiting the world that reconciles mobility with the need for belonging. Her textiles are not objects to be passively contemplated but existential proposals, invitations to rethink our relationship to place, identity, the sacred. That is why Nour Jaouda is among the most important artistic voices of her generation.
- Etel Adnan, Journey to Mount Tamalpais, The Post-Apollo Press, 1986
- Sofia Hallström, “Artist Nour Jaouda’s landscapes of memory”, Art Basel, March 2024
- Lu Rose Cunningham, “In Conversation with Nour Jaouda”, L’Essenziale Studio Vol.08, April 2025
