Nour Bahri

Nour Bahri dyes cotton and hemp in indigo vats she maintains herself, fermented rather than chemically reduced, which means the vat has to be fed and watched like a sourdough. A vat takes about ten days to come alive and, if she keeps it, will run for two or three years. The colour it gives changes across that lifetime, and Bahri dates her works by vat as well as by year.

The cloth is folded, clamped, stitched or bound before it goes in, so the dye reaches some of the fibre and not the rest. This is resist dyeing, a technique with versions in almost every textile culture, and Bahri is careful not to claim a single lineage for it. What interests her is the moment of unbinding, when a fold that was purely mechanical becomes an image. She hangs the finished pieces from the same points where they were bound, so the geometry that made the pattern is still visibly holding the work up.

Her recent pieces have grown to architectural size, eleven metres in the case of The Fold Remembers, and are increasingly installed away from the wall, in the room rather than on it. Bahri trained in textile engineering in Tunis before studying at La Cambre in Brussels, and she is unsentimental about the craft framing that gets applied to her work. She points out that the vat is chemistry and the fold is mathematics.

Bahri was awarded the Prix Iselp in 2023. Her work is held by MuHKA Antwerp, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Mathaf in Doha. She has been with the gallery since 2020.