Clay and textile—two of humanity’s most ancient and eloquent materials—serve as profound witnesses to human experience. Through impression, weave, and mark, these materials preserve intimate traces of touch and intention, creating permanent records of gesture across time. This exhibition brings together ten contemporary artists from the Mediterranean, Middle East, and their diasporas who harness these materials’ inherent capacity for memory and testimony.
The relationship between clay and textile is deeply entwined in human cultural memory. From the impressed patterns on ancient vessels to the encoded narratives in traditional weaving, these materials have long served as repositories of cultural knowledge and technical innovation. This is most poetically embodied in the Sleeping Lady of Malta—a Neolithic clay figurine who’s carefully rendered drapery speaks to humanity’s enduring impulse to document both form and fabric.
The artists presented here extend this legacy, transforming these ancient mediums into contemporary testimonies of identity, displacement, belonging, and cultural preservation.
The ceramic works of Elif Uras and Tancredi di Carcaci investigate how traditional forms carry contemporary cultural tensions. Working between New York and Iznik—the historic center of Ottoman ceramic production—Uras creates wheel-thrown plate paintings that bridge ceramics and textile patterns, underlining female labor and class through traditional techniques and contemporary sensibility. Di Carcaci employs the ancient practice of spolia—the repurposing of architectural fragments—as a metaphor for our shifting relationship with the sacred, examining how contemporary forms of idolatry emerge from the ruins of religious imagery.
Participating artists: Afsoon, Nuveen Barwari, Tancredi di Carcaci, Paolo Colombo, Lydia Delikoura, Hale Ekinci, Majd Abdel Hamid, Iliodora Margellos, Francesco Simeti, Elif Uras.
