Adrian Pepe: A Shroud is a Cloth 

Adrian Pepe’s poetic meditation on fragmentation and renewal gets an extended run at NIKA Project Space. It uses a monumental 200m² woollen textile piece that previously wrapped a building damaged in the 2020 Beirut Port explosion to highlight the relationship between materials, cultural landscapes, and ecological intimacy, “challenging the rigid demarcations between art, labor, nature, and performance through a textile medium” as the gallery has it.

The works in this show, all derived from a single source, range in scale from intimate to monumental. Wool – cleansed, processed, manipulated, and recontextualised – becomes a vessel for gestures, images, and rituals. Debris extracted from it – dirt, seeds, remnants of vegetable matter – captures the landscape within the material. Stitching, felting, and acts of assembly transform these materials into new compositions, reflecting on material processes, ecological intimacy, and the fragility of being. “Wool has this capacity to hold time – it is resilient yet malleable, intimate yet expansive,” says Pepe. “In this exhibition, I am exploring how materials are never neutral; they shape, and are shaped by care, labor, and the environments they inhabit.”

To 17 May.

Above: Adrian Pepe, Entangled Matters (fragment) (2024)