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Utilizing tapestry, tassels, and metal as a metaphor for the malleability of id, Nour Jaouda’s first solo present in London, “The place, if not faraway, is my place?” layers silhouettes of architectural components from Cairo (the place the artist, who’s of Libyan descent, grew up) into objects that marry components of portray, collage, and sculpture. The artist hand-dyes cotton and canvas cutouts, on which she traces motifs like outlines of the wood latticework of conventional mashrabia home windows or of the arches that enhance the domed interiors of mosques. She suspends the materials from twisted metal rods, repurposed straight from previous gates and fences in Cairo, to create standing buildings that invoke portals to an unnamed elsewhere.
So long as our tears are songs after we cry them, 2023, a physique of 9 cement slates mounted on the wall, presents delicate natural kinds that seem to drip and congeal, extending the artist’s experimentation with materiality. Different cloth works take their inspiration from the Islamic prayer mat, an object that may be rolled up, packed away, and unfurled to rework area from mundane to sacred. Jaouda hangs the textiles in order that they protrude from the wall. Quite than two-dimensional rugs, they counsel doorways into the artist’s reminiscence, refreshing the prayer mat’s well-worn cultural symbolism.
Jaouda’s reconfiguration of cultural signifiers manages to evoke a way of place with out stepping into specifics. Quite, it makes an attempt to coax into existence a brand new geography—the illusive “faraway” of the present’s title—as a website the place the artist can reconcile along with her personal sense of liminality and lack of belonging.
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