Moving Mountains 

In Jordan Nassar’s new multi-panel embroidery work, Surge, 2024, intricate, sunset-hued patterns form a gradient of colors. Zoom out and the peak of a mountain comes into focus. The Palestinian-American artist’s solo exhibition of the same title, which opens this week at Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles, takes its name from a book of prose by Etel Adnan, which reflects on the catastrophic violence of war while maintaining a sense of resilience and hope for the future. In one passage the Lebanese-American author writes “We came to transmit the shimmering/ from which we came; to name it.”

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Through his practice, Nassar transmits the shimmer of the land of his dreams as well as the Palestinian land that has been both destroyed and renamed, lost but not forgotten. This desire for a homeland—both personal and universal to those either forced to flee or born abroad—has been underscored and doubled down on in recent months since Israel began its relentless bombardment on Gaza. 

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In his poetic terrains, like Mudun Falastin (Palestinian Cities), 2024, mountains appear in pinks, purples, yellows. Peaks are defined not by borders but by the slight variation of their hues. Dreamlike and soft-edged, these summits are mirages of the artist’s motherland, which he came to know through the devotion of his patriotic father and the books by Arab luminaries that were kept around his childhood home. They are impossible places, conjured from his New York bedroom and rendered in fantastical tones. They are borderless, liminal, beacons of hope and emblems of a stolen geography, one that has quite literally been erased, destroyed, and renamed. “The mountains that I articulate are suggestions for the rest of the piece,” he says, noting how their edges define the space around them: the sky, water, room for imagination to run free. They are also suggestions for the porosity of borders.

While the artist thinks formally about color and composition as he depicts these scenes, his technique is rooted in his heritage. Needless to say, Palestine is always on his mind. He worries for his loved ones, his friends, those who took him in and taught him the language and history of the land, his Arabic teacher, the craftswomen whom he has collaborated with: Many of their lives are at risk, and their homes have been decimated. 

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In another landscape at Anat Ebgi, this cognizance materializes in white silhouettes of birds and lions that float, angel-like in the sky. The mosaic is named after and bordered by lyrics from Al-Atlal (The Ruins), an elegiac meditation on loss written by Egyptian poet Ibrahim Nagi and brought to life by legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum in the mid-60s. It recalls a 5th-7th century AD tile floor that was discovered by a Palestinian farmer in a refugee camp in Gaza in 2022 and has likely been destroyed by Israeli bombs: Here, this artifact is memorialized in Nassar’s own visual language.

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As a child, Nassar gravitated towards making things with his hands. He spent many hours perfecting origami birds and later crochet and weaving, and he admired the embroidery that adorned pillows and various knick-knacks in his home. As he got older, Palestinian craft became an entrypoint to understand his own identity as a member of the diaspora born and raised in America.

The first time he went to his home country was when he was 15, but it wasn’t until over a decade later when he visited his now husband’s family in Israel that something was awakened within him. Nassar began to seek out regional Tatreez embroidery—which has become homogenized due to displacement—until he was enmeshed in the history and culture embedded in these intricate and semantic shapes. He began to teach himself the technique and travel to Palestine three to four times a year, visiting embroidery centers, many of which are at refugee camps. 

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“There's this type of weaving that I love called Majdalawi weaving, which comes from Al-Majdal Asqalan village just north of Gaza,” he says of the vibrant, striped pattern. “That village was destroyed and is now the Israeli city of Ashkelon.” When the artist sought out to collaborate with such weavers, he found that only two Majdalawi practitioners remained. “Now I don't know if they're still alive,” he adds. 

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As his practice has grown over the past decade, the artist has translated the language of embroidery across various forms such as glass beads, wood, and now tile. The latter—large-scale, multi-panel pieces—were born from a desire to move his mountains into the world, which he hopes eventually will lead to commissions for both public and private spaces.

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Today, when Nassar thinks of Palestine, he is transported to a photo he took on an early visit to the West Bank, somewhere between Ramallah and Nablus, where hills dotted in grass and yellow flowers rise up to meet the sunkissed afternoon sky.

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‍“Jordan Nassar: SURGE” is on view from May 18 through July 3, 2024, at Anat Ebgi at 4859 Fountain Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90029.