Nadia Gohar
cistern, 2020
oil on tea towel
20 x 21 1/2 inches
cistern, 2020
oil on tea towel
20 x 21 1/2 inches
cistern, 2020
oil on tea towel
20 x 21 1/2 inches
Biographical Information
Nadia Gohar
b. 1989, Cairo, Egypt; lives and works in Toronto, ON
Education
2012 BFA, Massachusetts College of Art & Design, Boston, MA
Selected Exhibitions
2019 Mudstone, Erin Stump Projects, Toronto, ON (solo)
2019 Away From a State of Things, Darat Al Funun, Amman, Jordan
2019 Executive (Dis)Order: Art, Displacement, & the Ban, Queens Museum, Queens, NY
2018 Foundation Deposits, SOIL Gallery, Seattle, WA (solo)
Artist Reflection
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.
– Magdalyn Asimakis
