By Elliat Albrecht

Through her sculptural, hand-dyed textiles and hanging fiber installations, Libyan artist Nour Jaouda explores our spiritual relationship to landscapes and how spaces can hold and embody memory. As part of ‘In Transit,’ a series produced in partnership with Qatar Airways, we speak to Jaouda about how travel, places, and the moments in between shape her practice.

How does travel influence the way you create your work? Has moving between places and cultures changed the way you think about your own visual language?

The ability to move between places and inhabit different social and cultural landscapes has informed my practice in so many ways. Being Libyan, growing up in Cairo, and then moving to London has allowed me to embrace the idea of being rooted while simultaneously remaining open to change.

I now live between Cairo and London, and my creative practice takes shape in these two completely different worlds. It's in the spaces between these two worlds that I find meaning in the work.

Do you remember a journey that changed the way you think or work?

In 2023, I traveled to Benghazi in Libya. I hadn't been there for almost ten years, and revisiting a place that holds so much tangible memory was a very beautiful experience.

That visit influenced the work I was doing at the time for the Venice Biennale 2024. My grandma's garden was the starting point for research and drawings, which in turn informed the tapestries in the exhibition. I became interested in a very old, beautiful fig tree my grandma has been tending to for decades, and which I remember from my childhood. I was very interested in how plants – strongly attached to place – hold memory and embody identity. Through my practice, I began to explore how indigenous plants play a part in the spiritual and ancestral connections to spaces we inhabit.  

What do you need to feel grounded when you travel? Are there things that keep you connected to home?

A prayer mat and the ritual of praying. No matter where I am, it creates a center of gravity that grounds me in place.

Your work explores memory, cultural mobility and unstable narratives of time, place, and belonging. How has splitting your life between Cairo and London affected the way you think about these themes?  

As I move, the colors, textures, and forms shift. New architectural, urban, and natural landscapes start making their way into the work. My relationship to color was formed by movement. Color became a language that transcends cultural and social borders. It materializes the energy of a place; the chaos, the dust, the history, and the heritage all find their way into the work.  

As my practice develops, my process becomes more fragmentary. I became interested in deconstruction and the poetics of creative destruction. Through the process of décollage, I create meaning by taking things apart, in a continuous and laborious process of making and unmaking. Décollage is another form of restructuring that animates the material agency of the fabric and social identity of its history.  

Is there a moment during a flight when you feel most present or most inspired?  

The moment I disconnect from the rest of the world, I feel stillness and presence.  

When you land somewhere new, what is the first thing that pulls your attention – as someone who is always looking for texture, pattern, and material?  

The first thing that pulls my attention when I visit somewhere new is the people. To communicate and to connect with the local people of a place is what allows you to understand a culture and its history, heritage, and layers—rather than being a silent observer.  

Where do you go in London or Cairo when you want to understand the cities more deeply?  

In Cairo, I would go to wust-el-balad – or Downtown Cairo. I think of it as the beating heart of the city. Made up of a patchwork of vibrant histories and layers of architecture reflecting Islamic, Ottoman, and European colonial influences, it blends metropolitan chaos with a timeless beauty that is endlessly complex. 

In London, I would go nowhere specific and just walk aimlessly. The beauty lies in its subtle moments of discovery.  

At Art Basel Qatar, your installation A House Between Two Houses (2026) formed a ‘space shaped by emotional subjectivity, memory, and imagination rather than fixed geography’. What does it mean for you for a space to be unfixed?

An unfixed space is a place that escapes the boundaries of time and place and is in a constant process of becoming. Formed by memory, where meaning is established through what is absent, rather than what is present, A House Between Two Houses was an installation that attempted to materialize a liminal space. I wanted to create an architectural form that grapples with the fair's concept of 'Becoming'. Exploring the notion of transformation and decay, I wanted the structure to look like a drawing or a memory of a house that was in the process of its own becoming.

Between the fair itself and the city, was there a moment in Doha that stood out to you?

The moment that stood out to me in Doha was watching the fair come to life from the ground up. Meeting all the incredible artists, curators, and the production teams all in one space was such an insightful and rewarding experience. And Doha wasn’t just a meeting point for the art world, but a place rooted in a beautiful and rich history.