Nour Mobarak
B.C. Binning Gallery, CAG Façade and offsite at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station
Nour Mobarak, Recto Verso 3.3 (Red Yellow), 2024/25. Courtesy of the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York. Photo: Stephen Faught.
Nour Mobarak’s practice gives unexpected form to a career-long concern with the conditions of being. In work spanning sculpture, sound, performance, and moving image, the artist considers the ways that systems — physical, political and otherwise — form, entangle and mutate over time. She frequently draws on the principles of avant-garde music and poetry in her works, engaging questions of voice, knowledge, and inheritance through strategies such as rhythm, improvisation and self-imposed parameters. Her unconventional use of materials such as mycelium and resin extends directly from these impulses, embodying an interest in both discovering a material’s physical properties through making and allowing its idiosyncratic behaviours to shape her work in surprising ways.
In Bubonic Mnemonic, Mobarak turns her attention to the body as both system and carrier — a visceral technology and humanity’s earliest archive. With a longstanding interest in oral cultures, where memorized tropes and motifs have often served as mnemonics to carry knowledge, she reflects here on the role of the cliché in cognition. Working with familiar images, familial connections, as well as her own form — casts of her pregnant torso, impressions of her buttocks, a video of her vocal cords — she asks how knowledge takes form and is stored, how memory is drawn and redrawn by time, circumstance and lineage.
Biography
Nour Mobarak (b. 1985, Cairo, Egypt) lives and works between Bainbridge Island, WA and Athens, Greece. Her recent presentations include the 2026 Whitney Biennial, New York; the 2026 Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Saudi Arabia; WIELS, Brussels (2025); Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2025); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2024-25); Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Art Contemporanea, Turin (2024), Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2023); California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2024); and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2022). Her performances have been staged at venues such as the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2022), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2020), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019), LAXART, Los Angeles (2019), Stadslimeit, Antwerp (2016), and Cambridge University, UK (2010), amongst many others.
