Mobarak excavates the compulsions and glitches of violence and desire from the body, the earth, and her surrounding environment through voice, sculptural works, sound, performance, video, and writing.
“As a teenager,” the Lebanese American artist recalls, “I’d read that as a mind achieves mastery of a craft, so too come limitations on its ability to think creatively: as the brain creates neurological pathways through synaptic fusion, it settles the mind into ruts. I was desperate to avoid ruts. Instead, I embraced spontaneity, reasoning that the ephemeral could not be erased.” This logic pointed Mobarak towards some of the materials she often uses today: saprophytic mycelia in her sculptures, for instance, a kind of fungi that thrives on dead and toxic matter; Octal DPET plastic, or plaster. In her sound works, the human voice is often decoupled from speech and meaning through the layering and patterning of recordings of some of the most phonetically complex languages in the world. She often places her own body into performances.
To experience Mobarak’s rich interior world is like standing at the edge of an archeological site and gazing upon enduring, petrified objects set into new orbit. Her works are exercises in giving form to death and decomposition, in giving form to and making space for resilience. The viewer is invited to decipher root forms and branching networks that guide us out of our Anglocentrism, awakening dormant thoughts and sensations.
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Nour Mobarak (b. 1985, Cairo, Egypt) lives and works between Bainbridge Island, WA and Athens, Greece. Mobarak’s work is currently included in both the 2026 Whitney Biennial, New York, and In Interludes and Transitions: the 2026 Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale in Saudia Arabia. One-person exhibitions of her work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2024-25), Miguel Abreu Gallery (2025, 2021), the Municipal Theater at Piraeus, Greece (2023), RODEO London (2023), JOAN, Los Angeles (2022), and Hakuna Matata, Los Angeles (2020). Her works have been included in group shows at WIELS, Brussels (2025), Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2025), Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Art Contemporanea, Turin (2024), Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2023), California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2024), MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2022), Amant, Brooklyn (2022), RODEO Piraeus (2022), Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga (2021), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2020), Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2019), Cubitt, London (2019), and RODEO London (2017), among others. Her performances have been staged at 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).
Music by the artist has been released by Recital, Los Angeles, Cafe Oto’s TakuRoku, London, and Ultra Eczema, Antwerp, and is included in the Whitney Museum Library’s Special Collections. She has had sessions on BBC Radio 3, NTS Radio, and Dublab Radio. Her poetry has appeared in Triple Canopy, F.R. David, The Claudius App, and Poetry Salzburg Review, among others. Publications include Material Evidence, Serralves Museum (2025), Dafne Phono, Wendy’s Subway, New York (2024) and Sphere Studies and Subterranean Bounce, Recital, Los Angeles (2021).
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