June 6-July 12, 2025
17 Ipitou St., Plaka, Athens, 105 57
Curated by Dr. Tamara Chalabi
Organized by The Frances Rich School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences,
The American College of Greece, and The Demos Center
About the exhibition
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 selected works, including several new commissions, demonstrate diverse approaches to material testimony:
Paolo Colombo’s commissioned works for ITERARTE embrace the Chamba Rumal tradition—a 17th-century embroidery technique once practiced by Himalayan royal women—where silk threads transform muslin into intricate narratives. His signature visual language of lines, dots, and squares, originally inspired by Byzantine and Classical mosaics, finds new resonance through thread. The embroidered works extend his meditative practice into textile form, where each stitch echoes the precise geometry of his compositions while engaging with living craft traditions of the Indian subcontinent.
Iliodora Margellos engages deeply with embroidery’s dual heritage as domestic craft and tool of resistance. Her meticulously stitched works, developed over months of patient labor, break free from traditional grid structures to create emotional landscapes that reveal themselves differently from afar and in intimate proximity. Analepsis (After the Mares) exemplifies this approach, while “Hope, a Field of Poppies”—created in collaboration with INAASH through ITERARTE—connects her practice to Palestinian refugee women in Lebanon, acknowledging embroidery’s ongoing role as a portable medium of cultural preservation and resistance. Each stitch in her work becomes a meditation on nature’s forms and a testament to embroidery’s enduring power as both personal expression and political witness.
Majd Abdel Hamid in newly commissioned and existing work reuses works on fabric and embroidery, to underline the multifaceted dimensions of use, inviting the viewer to join him in rethinking notions of memory, trauma and psychological nuances as an ongoing archive of existence. His work transforms materials into records of human experience, challenging conventional approaches to documentation.
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.
Francesco Simeti’s deeply layered works draw on social, philosophical, and environmental discourses, particularly exploring water’s dual nature through site-specific digital collages and textile installations. Through layered imagery that incorporates historical and contemporary sources, his works map the transformation of natural landscapes, using fabric’s inherent mutability to reflect on ecological shifts and human intervention.
Through a dynamic fusion of sequins, gouache, and graphite, Lydia Delikoura’s works explore the bonds between humans, creatures, and landscape. She creates harmonious spaces where shimmering elements—both natural and synthetic—interweave with themes of sisterhood and impossible love, drawing inspiration from classical mythology. This investigation extends into her ITERARTE collaborations, where paintings are transformed into functional objects like stools, challenging conventional distinctions between fine art and design while preserving traces of material evolution.
Through a dynamic fusion of sequins, gouache, and graphite, Lydia Delikoura’s works explore the bonds between humans, creatures, and landscape. She creates harmonious spaces where shimmering elements—both natural and synthetic—interweave with themes of sisterhood and impossible love, drawing inspiration from classical mythology. This investigation extends into her ITERARTE collaborations, where paintings are transformed into functional objects like stools, challenging conventional distinctions between fine art and design while preserving traces of material evolution.
Hale Ekinci transforms domestic textiles into repositories of immigrant memory, merging Middle Eastern and Western traditions through a distinctive process of repurposing family photographs. In her newly commissioned Under One Roof (2025) installation and earlier works like Travel Pillow Necklace (2023) and Apron (2022), she obscures faces with French knots and overlays traditional Middle Eastern patterns with contemporary Western symbols. Influenced by Turkish Oya—meaningful lace edgings on headscarves traditionally used by women for non-verbal communication—the piece features exaggerated, colourful crochet edges resembling paragraphs or letters, encoding messages in their own right.
Afsoon’s ceramic vessels navigate between function and storytelling, drawing on her transcultural journey from Iran through California to London Fools and Devils (2025) transforms traditional Persian vessels into contemporary narratives. Each piece merges cultural symbols with talisman-like elements, reimagining an ancient tale of innocence and temptation through the lens of diasporic identity.
Nuveen Barwari’s work materializes the complexities of Kurdish-American identity through textile interventions. In Cola and Chiya, she pairs references to Kurdish mountains with Coca-Cola imagery, creating a charged dialogue between traditional and contemporary cultural symbols. Her architectural window installations, constructed from four traditional Kurdish dresses representing Kurdistan’s regions, transform intimate garments into monumental structures that speak to both fragmentation and preservation of cultural heritage across borders.
Through these diverse approaches, clay and textile emerge not merely as artistic media but as active participants in the preservation and transformation of cultural memory. Each work serves as both witness and testimony, speaking to the enduring power of materials to carry forward human stories across time and geography.
Participating artists: Afsoon, Nuveen Barwari, Tancredi di Carcaci, Paolo Colombo, Lydia Delikoura, Hale Ekinci, Majd Abdel Hamid, Iliodora Margellos, Francesco Simeti, Elif Uras.
About Tamara Chalabi
Dr. Tamara Chalabi is a cultural historian, curator, and founder of multiple pioneering art initiatives; ITERARTE and the RUYA Foundation. Her curatorial practice spans the Mediterranean to India, where she has established dynamic conversations for contemporary art and cultural exchange. Notable projects include commissioning four national Iraqi Pavilions at the Venice Biennale. Dr. Chalabi holds a PhD from Harvard University and has published extensively on cultural heritage. Her latest project, Material Witnesses explores intersections between historical materiality and contemporary artistic practice.
