Kurdish artist, Nuveen Barwari, is having her first solo exhibition as an artist at the Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee. It is called Gul Barîn—the state of being showered with flowers. Her powerful work centers her Kurdish upbringing, culture, and advocacy.
Instead of focusing on what is often lost through translation, Barwari sifts through the different shapes and symbols that are found when one is living between clashing cultures, languages, and materials. Barwari’s expansive studio practice involves gathering and repurposing artifacts from her community such as worn Kurdish clothes, fabric, and used rugs to investigate the politics of display, painting, fashion, and borders. Barwari paints, cuts, screenprints, and sews on these materials to create discrete objects and larger immersive installations to reflect and explore conditions of assimilation, colonial amnesia, and the fragmented state of diasporic living. There is a sense of history, place, and loss in the way elements of the body are presented in Barwari’s work. The use and reuse of textiles evoke how they might have looked on a person, how they would have danced or even moved in them. Barwari draws on a wide range of influences from Kurdish literature and dance to U.S commodity culture, the mise-en-scéne of West Asian bazaars, and geopolitical . Gul Barîn is an attempt at locating the space between a love song and a protest song.
Explore more of Barwari’s work here: https://nuveenbarwari.com/
