Nada Baraka and Esraa Elfeky on Across A Velvet Horizon

  • Tabari Artspace: Your exhibition, Across A Velvet Horizon, feels like an unfinished archive - fragmentary, evocative, open-ended. Can you talk...

    Tabari Artspace: Your exhibition, Across A Velvet Horizon, feels like an unfinished archive - fragmentary, evocative, open-ended. Can you talk about how this sense of incompleteness shapes your work?

    Nada Baraka: The unknown is central to my practice. My work navigates around dream strategy where memory is unstable, shifting, and in flux. I’m drawn to the gaps - the things we don’t remember, the stories that have been erased, the textures of the past that resist coherence. The paintings in this show are like fractured landscapes, suspended between reality and dream. They borrow from my grandfather’s archive - old letters, photos, and ephemera - but nothing is whole, nothing is clear. The past is always slipping through our fingers.

  • Esraa Elfeky: That same uncertainty resonates in my sculptures. My works are built from layers of fabric, leather, and thread,... Esraa Elfeky: That same uncertainty resonates in my sculptures. My works are built from layers of fabric, leather, and thread,... Esraa Elfeky: That same uncertainty resonates in my sculptures. My works are built from layers of fabric, leather, and thread,... Esraa Elfeky: That same uncertainty resonates in my sculptures. My works are built from layers of fabric, leather, and thread,...
    Esraa Elfeky: That same uncertainty resonates in my sculptures. My works are built from layers of fabric, leather, and thread, materials that feel both fragile and enduring. I was thinking about landscapes that hold history - how the desert, for example, is a site of memory, constantly shifting but also preserving traces of what once was. The sculptures resemble fossils, relics from an imagined past, but they don’t tell a single, definitive story. They invite speculation, reconstruction.

  • TA: There’s an archaeological quality to the exhibition - the way the viewer is positioned as both observer and excavator, piecing together meaning from fragments. Was this intentional?

    NB: Absolutely. I love the idea of the viewer as an active participant, not just consuming but interpreting, connecting the dots. The wooden structure in the gallery, for example, serves as a kind of abstract map, guiding the audience through the show but also leaving space for personal readings. The way we make sense of history is deeply subjective - it’s a process of layering, omission, reinterpretation.


    EE: In a way, the exhibition is an act of excavation. My largest work, The Blue Wadi Resurrection, sprawls across the floor like an unearthed ruin, while my suspended pieces hover in a kind of limbo, neither fully present nor fully absent. These forms invite the audience to look closer, to imagine what’s missing.
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  • TA: The works feel deeply personal, yet they resist clear narratives. How do you negotiate this balance between intimacy and ambiguity?

    NB: I think memory itself is ambiguous. Even the most personal recollections are subject to distortion, retelling, forgetting. My paintings contain snippets of text, hidden beneath layers of paint—phrases from postcards, notes from my grandfather’s archive - but they’re obscured, barely legible. It’s like memory itself: we think we know it, but it’s always shifting.

    EE: For me, materiality is key. The fabrics I use carry their own histories - some are worn, stained, imperfect. These materials, like memory, contain traces of the past, but they don’t spell things out. There’s an openness, an invitation for interpretation.

  • TA: Can you tell us more about your influences?

    NB: Beyond archives, I’m inspired by the history of interior design, especially how spaces and objects shape memory and identity. I’m fascinated by how design elements—like colour or texture—can transport you to another time or evoke specific emotions.

     

    I also read a lot of crime fiction and classic novels, drawing inspiration from a mix of genres. I love crime and mystery novels, particularly those by Agatha Christie and Tana French, for their psychological depth and layered storytelling. The complexity and tension in their work influence the narrative-driven and multi-layered nature of my art. Philosophical texts, like Deleuze’s The Logic of Sensation, shape my understanding of sensory experience, reinforcing the abstract qualities in my work.

     

    Japanese authors like Haruki Murakami also fuel my creativity, especially his surreal storytelling, which helps me blur the lines between reality and fantasy. I’m drawn to vintage manga and animation from the 1930s to the 1970s, particularly for their raw, often uncomfortable quality. There’s something striking about how these works combine unsettling emotions with bold, sometimes hostile colours and forms.

     

    In terms of music, I listen to a blend of indie, classical, and ambient genres, which help set the mood and allow me to tap into different emotional layers while I work. The way music builds texture and depth reflects how I construct my compositions. Lastly, music and audiobooks are a constant companion—they enhance my creativity and help me engage with different emotional registers while working. They are an essential part of my process in building layers and atmosphere.

    EE: One of my greatest inspirations is travel literature, particularly pioneering Arabic travelogues like those of Ibn Battuta. His way of documenting his explorations—blending fact, fiction, and even exaggeration—resonates deeply with my practice. The way he transfers knowledge from one world to another has significantly influenced my storytelling approach.
    TA: Can you tell us more about your influences? NB: Beyond archives, I’m inspired by the history of interior design,...

  • TA: Nada, why do you work with abstraction?

    NB: Abstraction allows me to evoke emotion rather than define form. It’s about creating space for the viewer to experience something personal, without the constraints of representation.


    TA: Are there any motifs or icons that repeat in your practice?

    NB: Motifs like body parts are regularly absorbed in my practice. There is an interaction between body and space, and the recreation of dreamlike processes. I believe that all experiences—whether physical or emotional—manifest through the body, evolving in relation to both the real and imagined spaces we inhabit. The contrast between fluid and sharp lines reflects the tension between organic movement and structure, while the drips and transparencies in my outlines reveal the underlying process of creation. Through these elements, I explore the body’s transformation and its dynamic relationship with both external environments and the unconscious, reflecting themes of identity, change, and the fluid nature of self.
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  • TA: Esra, what fascinates you about archaeology and deep time?

    EE: I'm fascinated by fossils and geology because the land holds the key to our history and identity. It reveals stories far older than human civilization, tracing patterns of change and adaptation over deep time. I believe that everything that will happen in the future has, in some form, already occurred in the past, just with a different narrative. But to grasp these cycles, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to human history alone, we need to look at cosmic history as well. The past is a vast archive, and by studying it, whether through geology, fossils, or the remnants of ancient landscapes, we can better understand the present and even anticipate the future.

    TA: Your work is grounded in materiality and has a labour-intensive process, can you tell us more about this? 

    EE: I create drawings of hybrid creatures that merge different worlds like sea, desert, river, forest, and urban life. It’s always been a dream to bring these beings to life through sculpture, embodying the cycle of life and death. By materializing these creatures, I aim to reconnect with the past, reviving forms that once existed or could have existed, and placing them in dialogue with the present.

    I’m particularly drawn to soft materials, especially fabric because they evoke a sense of fragility. Soft sculpture allows me to explore the fine line between fact and fiction, where imagination takes a tangible form. The material’s tactile nature reflects the way I perceive these creatures, as something ephemeral yet deeply connected to history, memory, and transformation.

    TA: Esra, what fascinates you about archaeology and deep time? EE: I'm fascinated by fossils and geology because the land...

  • TA: Your works blur the boundaries between personal, cultural, and environmental histories. Do you see them as existing in a space between reality and fiction?

    NB: Definitely. I’m interested in what happens when history is reimagined through a dream-like lens. The past is not fixed; it’s fluid, porous. My works are portals into alternate histories - versions of the past that might have been, or that exist in a parallel dimension of memory and imagination.

    EE: I approach history as something non-linear, non-binary. My sculptures reference geological time, organic decay, remnants of civilizations- histories that feel both ancient and speculative. The desert was once underwater; fossils of marine life are buried beneath the sand. I think of my works as existing in this in-between space—neither fully past nor present, neither completely real nor entirely fictional.

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  • TA: The exhibition refuses easy resolutions. Was that a deliberate choice?
     

    NB: Yes. We live in a world obsessed with clarity, categorisation, closure, but history, memory, and identity don’t work like that. Across a Velvet Horizon is about embracing the unknown, sitting with uncertainty, allowing things to remain unresolved.
     
    EE: The exhibition asks questions rather than providing answers. What do we do with what’s missing? How do we reconstruct what has been lost? The beauty is in the search, in the not-knowing.
     


    TA: Finally, what do you hope audiences take away from the exhibition?
     
    NB: A sense of possibility. I hope they leave with more questions than they came with.
     
    EE: A curiosity for what lies beneath the surface.