Filwa Nazer: The Housed Body
Selma Feriani Gallery
October 2025
In The Housed Body, Filwa Nazer presents a new body of work that extends her ongoing inquiry into transition, alienation, and the body in space. At the core of this exhibition is a personally significant stage of transition in the artist’s life. Through embroidered and stitched fabric, sculptural textiles, and suspended forms, Nazer navigates the ever-shifting relationship between the body and the spaces that attempt to contain it, both sartorial and architectural. Whether hung flat against a wall or twisting in space, these works stage encounters of tension, awkwardness, and at times, estrangement.
Here, both clothing and architecture are rendered in their blueprinted forms and annotated in her visual language of motifs, materials, and colours. Sewing patterns and floorplans, shapes often taken directly from clothes that no longer fit and homes once inhabited or spaces being planned for, are abstracted into lines and layered geometric forms, then transmuted through different textures, colours, and thread onto Nazer’s chosen medium. These forms intersect, rotate, and press uneasily against one another, revealing the discomfort of fitting in, growing out of, and of navigating changing spaces, roles, and bodies.
Indeed, garments and houses are only provisional homes. They are neither entirely secure nor permanent containers. Nazer asks: what does it mean for a body to be housed? And what violence, negotiation, or strangeness occurs in the anticipatory space between what is out-grown and what is becoming?
Upon entering the gallery, viewers are met with the exhibition’s largest work, Self Portrait. Its base layer, resembling a soft-hued grid, is composed of multiple floor plans: some recalled from childhood memories, some lifted from her own home, and others still from plans of a new house. Upon this architectural foundation, the repeated shapes of torso sewing patterns and other garment pieces appear to descend, twisting down the centre of the work. This suggestion of falling and movement atop the careful, detailed gridlines of the architectural plans not only offers interesting juxtapositions of rigidity and movement and of opacity and transparency, but also hints at a new shift within Nazer’s practice. What seems at first to be the solid structure of technical plans unravels upon closer inspection: the floorplans delineate spaces that are sometimes impossible to manoeuvre while the garment patterns obfuscate and interrupt with precarious movement. At such a scale, the muddled feelings of negotiating and anticipating change become palpably felt.
Repetition is a key element of this process of negotiation, not only in the recurrence of certain transposed forms across works, but also in the iterative process that unfolds across series. As such, these series make the processual nature of transition visible, serving as sites for testing and working through across multiple attempts. Nazer works through her own lived experiences of moving between homes and shifting identities to providently plot and project these new sets of possible amalgams.
In some instances, like in Diagrams of Dislocation, the series suggests a concerted effort at the dissection of this process of transition, in which rooms seem to precariously hover one another, dashed and solid lines attempt to connect body and space, and necklines ambiguously uphold homes. In others, like In Search of the Seam, outlines of spaces and pattern pieces seem to spin endlessly around themselves, landing overlapped, unresolved, and unsettled.
This sense of tension in space can be seen across the works where specific architectural plans are at times disquietingly repeated, unsettlingly combined, or out-right impossible. In Intimate Template I for example, a container resembling a garment with two opposing necklines suggests an impossible torso stretched between openings or a doubled body with two emerging heads. It is overlaid with architectural drawings that are similarly troubling to read, particularly a green space that appears to have no outer walls, begging the questions: Is it a series of open air corridors leading to nowhere? How might one inhabit this unusual space? Despite this ambiguity, its shape is recognisable as an outline that appears as a spectre across multiple works, a place that insistently demands to be dealt with.
Across the exhibition, what emerges is not only a speculative record of physical manoeuvrings, but also a psychological charting of emotions onto bodies and space, whether in anxious black dots, semi-opaque layers of obfuscation, or red zones of intersections nestled in chest cavities. Nazer’s method is both analytical and expressive, demonstrating a persistent urge to pin down and master the trajectories of what is yet to come.
Moving between diagrammed surfaces to three-dimensional forms, the work shifts between the visuals of representation and the viscerality of corporality, drawing viewers further into these unsettled negotiations. In works like Shifting Patterns, Nazer expands her practice further into embodied space. Suspended from the ceiling, these forms may echo some of her previous sculptural installations; however, they mark a distinctly more ambiguous and uncanny feeling. Indeed, these suspended pieces twirl and stretch, their combinations of materials suggesting both comfort and protection while straddling disfigurement.
Across The Housed Body emerges a tension between delicacy and disturbance. What at first appears orderly reveals impossible spaces and awkward manoeuvrings. Nazer’s use of embroidered fabrics, padded textiles, and intricate stitching may initially suggest softness, protection, and even a stereotypically feminine domesticity. Yet, closer inspection unveils sharpness in pointed edges, sometimes violent intersections, and deviant forms. Thus, the comfort implied by material is unsettled by the unease in their composition: the rigidity and uncanny orderliness of diagrams and plans that ultimately prove untenable.
These works embody the discomfort of making things fit, whether in garments, homes, or the body itself. The sense of awkwardness or estrangement that accompanies transition is made visible–diagrammed and dissected. Other times, uncanny doublings, and recombination of forms into strange or impossible configurations conjure the fear of the familiar turned strange, the psychological reckoning shifting with our containers.
Throughout the exhibition, the question of how the body is or will be housed remains in flux, oscillating between comfort and unease. In staging this uncertainty, ultimately Nazer does not offer resolution; rather, she insists on its ongoing and anticipatory negotiation.
Rotana Shaker
September 2025
