drip splash, oil on tea towel, 18 x 20.5 inches

cistern, oil on tea towel, 20 x 21 1/2 inches

want not, oil on tea towel, 20 x 14.5 inches

Nadia Gohar’s practice explores material transitions and asks questions around what is memorialized by history. Gohar’s sculptures employ everyday materials that are overlooked in histories of art and archeology, emphasizing their importance to local, materialist histories. Through her works Gohar asks: What is unearthed? How are these objects presented? What is worthy of memory?

Memory is not only an embodied experience but an institutional narrative. Gohar employs

materials that hold strong vernacular memories but would have no currency in museological representations of Cairo, where the artist is from. The static nature of the West’s representation of this place is also countered by Gohar’s paintings which heavily reference water. In these works, water represents the unwieldy movement and displacement of people and cultural objects.

text by Magdalyn Asimakis