“I aim to reach a space between becoming and unbecoming, presence and absence, self and other, creation and destruction”

AT: Where are you from and how/why did you start engaging with art?

NJ: I am Libyan but I was born and raised in Egypt. Ever since I can remember I had a compelling urgency to make. I’ve always been engaging with all forms of visual culture, from Cairo’s multilayered architecture to the rich histories of craftsmanship that flood its chaotic streets. You cannot escape it. Its urban landscape carries a unique sense of time and place; a tension between the past and the present; And it is this tension that has always driven my creative practice.

AT: When did it become serious?

NJ: It has always been a natural instinct for me to create. It was just a matter of how I could channel this passion into a sustainable and professional practice. And I think it became serious when I started participating in group exhibitions and collaborating with other artists and galleries during my Masters at the RCA. I realized the importance of working outside the rather comfortable institutional boundaries of art school and understanding how the art world operates beyond the parameters of my studio.

AT: Is there any person who has been significant in your breakthrough as an artist?

NJ: I think if I could name all the people who were significant in my breakthrough as an artist, the list would be too long. From the past tutors and studio mates at art school to the curators and artists I’ve worked with, they were all crucial to the development of my practice and research. They’ve encouraged me, challenged and pushed me towards a never-ending critical dialogue between myself my work and the spaces we occupy.

AT: What is your first approach to the work? How would you describe your practice?

NJ: My practice takes shape through a deconstructive process of making and unmaking. Everything is fragmentary, incomplete and in a constant state of becoming. Through painting, textile design and installation art, I explore issues of cultural mobility and the aesthetics of migration. My work is an attempt to challenge conventional ideas of identity and its volatile narratives of time, place and belonging. By constructing and de-constructing cultural motifs, found images and historical references, I fracture narratives to elicit meaning. I always start with the cut; a radical and poetic strategy that is as much destructive as it is constructive; where the act of undoing and unbuilding becomes an addition rather than negation to the work. In this act of material deconstruction, meaning is destabilized activating the social and political agency of the work.

AT: What do you aim to reach with your work?

NJ: Liminality. I aim to reach a space between becoming and unbecoming presence and absence self and other creation and destruction. A space where my own language of creative destruction can exist. A language that can mobilize new perceptions of social and political reality.

AT: What are your favourite tools and materials for working?

NJ: Found textiles, steel, concrete, clay and locally-sourced dyes.

AT: What do you feel while you work? Do you usually think about the final outcome beforehand?

NJ: While making, it is a constant struggle between chance and intent; between the undiscovered realm of the unknown, and the ordered vision. It is an impossible conflict between the absolute freedom of endless possibility and the imprisonment of my own conventions of making and thinking… A never-ending paradoxical struggle to liberate myself from my own subjectivity.

AT: How do you understand that a work is finished?

NJ: I think an artwork is never finished. And never should be. What drives the viewer to generate meaning is not what is present, but rather what is absent. An unresolved image/object stimulates our innate desire to fill in the gaps, it leaves our mind driven to construct unity, meaning and closure, allowing new connections and understandings to emerge.

AT: Where does the inspiration for the work come from?

NJ: My ideas only come to me when I’m working. I need to be in constant motion. The persistent moving of home, studio and daily practice from London to Cairo, has informed my practice and the significance of the spatial and cultural temporalities in which it operates. A migratory practice developed where movement, provisionality and site-specificity became essential to the work’s production and reception. I am constantly rediscovering the urgency of making and the very fundamental process of inhabiting the social space in which the textiles are sourced, deconstructed and reconstructed through craft.

AT: Are there any artists who influenced your works? Why?

NJ: Mona Hatoum for her electricity and material agency. Rothko for his sublime emotion, psychological drama and his silent revelations. Rauschenberg for his playful poetics of destruction. Eva Hesse for the ephemerality of art, of our bodies and of matter. Noguchi for his timelessness. Fontana for his Spatialist revolution. Oscar Murillo for his borderless ethic of mobility. And the words of: Mahmoud Darwish for his poetic resistance, exilic meditations and lyrical prose.

AT: How important is the role of social media for you?

NJ: It is becoming more and more necessary for connecting, communicating and researching, Once it becomes too necessary, I think it starts to get in the way of the art.

AT: What is your opinion about NFTs and their impact on the art world?

NJ: I am genuinely not concerned with NFTs, it has nothing to do with the experience of art, but rather with its digital consumption, ownership and monetization. It undermine’s art’s sincerety, power and metaphysics of truth.

AT: As an artist, what is your point of view about the contemporary art system?

NJ: I think there is a lot of undoing, unlearning and decolonizing to be done.

AT: What do you find to be the most challenging or daunting thing about pursuing art? What is the most rewarding part of working as an artist?

NJ: The most challenging aspect is that there is never enough time and space. The most rewarding aspect is the ability to escape time and space.

AT: What do you do besides art?

NJ: Travel, move, read and see more art.

AT: What are your goals and expectations for the future?

NJ: I try not to thinking too far ahead, but for now, to keep moving towards what moves me.

Nour Jaouda is a Libyan artist, based in London and Cairo.

Through painting, textile design and installation art, Nour explores issues of cultural mobility and the aesthetics of migration. By constructing and de-constructing cultural motifs, found images and historical references, she attempts to challenge conventional ideas of identity formation and its volatile narratives of time, place and belonging. Her practice takes shape through a deconstructive process of making and unmaking, where everything is fragmentary, incomplete and constantly evolving. 

Her work evokes issues of movement and the politics of cultural amnesia. Through material deconstruction and the reinterpretation of traditional craftsmanship, she fractures narratives to elicit meaning. Meaning, in this case, relies on the process-bound event of its deconstruction, where the act of undoing and unbuilding becomes an addition rather negation to the work. She seeks a form of creation that is manifested not through a fixed representational engagement with material, but rather through a transient ever-changing process of becoming.

In these textural compositions, Nour layers personal and collective memory in an attempt to narrativise the migratory experience and explore the liminal space between here and there, and the familiar and strange.