Apartment Wrestling, 2026, Collage, moire and staples on wood panel, 5 x 7 in
RUBA NADAR
Artist Statement
My work and studio function as spaces of collection and reassembly, where figures and images are reconsidered through gesture, memory, and cinematic reinterpretation. Working across painting and collage, I use stitched fabrics, torn photographs, collage scraps, and archival sports imagery to construct layered compositions that hover between presence and absence. Each material is chosen for its physical and cultural resonance, and assembled through a language of visibility and longing.
Drawing from Egyptian cinema and my Egyptian and Lebanese family archive, I am interested in the tensions embedded within images: pauses, glances, and fragments that suggest unspoken narratives. Film stills, photographs, and textiles are disrupted and reworked, allowing imagined characters to emerge through acts of interruption and recomposition.
My practice is grounded in bricolage. I gather visual material from a range of sources, including family albums, vintage sports magazines, digital screenshots, and inherited textiles, guided as much by formal affinities, colour, rhythm, gesture, texture, as by content. Through processes of tearing, stitching, stapling, and overpainting, I construct dense, multi-layered surfaces in which fragments remain suspended and narratives resist resolution.
Queerness and visibility remain a tension in my practice, yet my work is drawn toward the quieter, more intimate dimensions of my experience: tenderness, observation, and subtle gestures. The physicality of tenderness informs my use of the crop and ultra-tactile materials such as velvet, which function both as cinematic devices and as means of bringing the viewer into close proximity with the image or character.
At its core, my practice approaches the archive as an emotional and historical site, where fragments of personal and collective memory are rearranged into intimate, unresolved forms.