Nour Jaouda is a Libyan artist who fuses life and aesthetic practice through her continual movements between places real and remembered. Fig trees belonging to the artist’s grandmother in Benghazi, Libya, lend their poetic impetus for the three textiles displayed in the Biennale Arte. Strongly attached to place, trees hold and embody memories. Jaouda recreates their botanical elements by deconstructing cloth, dyeing it in earthen tones, and then resewing it into sculptural tapestries. She draws from the personification of olive trees by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in conceptualisation and title. Threaded through these and previous works are notions of rootlessness and resilience, destruction and regeneration, and timelessness. Jaouda relishes in the slow, physical, and felt processes of fabricating hand-dyed textiles. The textiles’ inherent connectivity begets their association with the eternal and divine; to the artist, textiles have no beginning or end. The vegetal dyes possess their own force and unpredictability, activating the work. Jaouda’s sumptuously layered fabrics reverberate with colours that are deep and ethereal, shadowy and luminescent, and as infinitely textured as memory itself.
This is the first time the work of Nour Jaouda is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Jessica Gerschultz
