Set up view of Nour Jaouda, “How do we carry the endless blue?” (2025), hand-dyed cotton canvas, metal (all images Anna Souter/Hyperallergic)
BRISTOL, England — It takes some bravery for a younger artist supplied a gallery the peak of a warehouse to deliver issues right down to a human stage. For her first institutional solo present, Libyan artist Nour Jaouda erects a tent in the course of Spike Island’s cavernous central gallery. Patterned with semi-abstracted botanical motifs, this hand-crafted cloth set up is emblematic of Jaouda’s ongoing exploration of the alternately transient, cyclical, and enduring nature of each a physique of labor and a panorama.
An intimate area conceived as a web site of memorial, “The iris grows on both sides of the fence” (2025) was produced in collaboration with craftspeople from Chariah-el-Khayamia, Cairo’s historic road of tent makers, who are sometimes commissioned to create non permanent “third spaces” throughout festivals and gatherings. The introductory wall textual content positions the tent as an “intimate retreat” the place guests collect to “mourn a landscape that has been uprooted or dispossessed.” With its sides draping onto the ground, Jaouda’s tent varieties extra of a passageway than an area match for the durational act of mourning, since there may be nowhere to sit down and never a lot area to maneuver round different guests.
Set up view of Nour Jaouda, Issues of Time
However, the concept of an set up as an intimate area to think about misplaced landscapes comes by means of powerfully. The tent is adorned with botanical motifs, together with {a partially} abstracted rendering of the purple-petaled Faqqua iris, the nationwide flower of Palestine. An emotive image of resistance, resilience, and hope, its presence additionally invokes the lack of lives, cultural heritage, and ecological variety attributable to Israel’s battle and genocide in Gaza. There’s something topographical about Jaouda’s textured textiles; the layering of earthy-colored panels means that land is a susceptible but enduring container for cultural reminiscence.
The exhibition additionally features a choice of Jaouda’s wall-based works, produced particularly for this present. These items are illustrative of her labor-intensive course of, during which she hand-dyes cloth with pure pigments earlier than slicing out shapes and re-forming these fragments into tapestry-like assemblages. Suspended a few inches from the wall, they include small gaps and perforations, revealing the complexity of their building. Reasonably than being appliquéd onto a pre-made backdrop, they’re assembled piece by piece till they type a cohesive complete. The result’s a complicated type of patchwork that attests to the circumstances of its personal making as an act of reparation and therapeutic.
Throughout Jaouda’s observe, each bit is crafted partly from the offcuts of earlier works, forging a artistic continuum and a way of cyclicality, transience, and endurance — the identical stuff of collective reminiscence. The boundary between studio and exhibition area is made hazy by her suggestions loops, corresponding to her determination to hold remnant cloth from steel armatures to create a type of display on the gallery’s entrance. In doing so, she turns it right into a threshold the place historical past, reminiscence, and panorama are made, mourned, and ever-returning.
Set up view of Nour Jaouda, Issues of Time
Set up view of Nour Jaouda, Issues of Time
Set up view of Nour Jaouda, Issues of Time
Element of labor by Nour Jaouda
Set up view of Nour Jaouda, Issues of Time
Element of labor by Nour Jaouda
Nour Jaouda: Issues of Time continues at Spike Island (133 Cumberland Highway, Bristol, United Kingdom) by means of January 11, 2026. The exhibition was organized by the establishment.
