Jordan Nassar Explores Diasporic Identity and Imagined Palestinian Landscapes Through Tatreez Panels in London

The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once dedicated a poem to the frustration he felt at his inability to describe a cloud. Staring up at the sky while walking alone on an unnamed mountain, he wrote that the clouds were “like a cottoned ginned by wind, like a white idea about the meaning of existence”. That poem – and presumably Darwish’ failing words – guides a new series of contemporary artworks by the New York artist Jordan Nassar, on display at No 9 Cork Street in London. The presentation by the Dubai gallery The Third Line is the artist’s first in the UK in a decade.

The Manhattan-born Nassar often works with tatreez, a Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery to create fictive landscapes combined with the tradition’s abstract patterning.

The piece They Build Homes with Clouds (2026) places green, red and purple-hued mountains against an ochre sky, and beyond them, the sea, embroidered on canvas. The panel is surrounded by four smaller ones depicting a pattern of colourful embroidered squares. The contrast between the repetitive square motifs of tatreez and the organic shapes of the mountain landscapes is startling.

Nassar describes these landscapes as “versions of Palestine as they exist in the minds of the diaspora”. “They are the Palestine I heard stories about growing up, half made of imagination. They are dreamlands and utopias that are colourful and fantastical – beautiful and romantic, but bittersweet,” he says. But the sunny, warm-coloured and arid scenes could equally be from an American road movie at the point of driving through the Mojave or Sonoran deserts. The panels are moveable, and appear in distinct geometrical shapes which the artist said were inspired by the Iranian-American artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, who used a similar modular method in her series Convertibles. Farmanfarmaian had pioneered a unique style blending mirror-mosaic technique with influences from postwar abstract expressionism she was exposed to as a student in New York.

Nassar says his exploration of Palestinian identity is driven by his own upbringing as a New Yorker. His father is of Palestinian heritage and his mother is Polish. He recalled his childhood in a city that embraced its status as the gateway into the land of immigrants that is the US. “I grew up in the '90s in New York, where multiculturalism was cool. These days people get mad if you're asking about someone's background. But when I was little, that was fine to ask, because everyone was from somewhere,” he told The National. “It was just sharing information because you're curious about people, and you want to tell them about where your family's from,” he said.

His paternal grandfather migrated to the US in the 1910s before the Nakba and was a central figure in establishing the Arab American community in the inner suburb of Yonkers. He later sponsored the arrival of hundreds of families displaced by the Nakba. But being American then was a priority for the family as it was for all of the city's fresh wave of immigrants. Nassar’s grandfather opened a cafe that sold hamburgers and milkshakes, and did not teach his children Arabic. “They were never taught Arabic because in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, the mindset was: we're American now, so we speak English,” he said.

Questions about belonging and the diaspora experience are therefore central to the work. “That really taps into feelings of not feeling Palestinian enough because I'm ‘only half’, and I grew up in New York. There's this sense (that) I don't do it right,” he said. “I don't speak Arabic fluently and natively. We cook some of the dishes that I grew up with differently than they do in Palestine because it trickled down through generations,” he said. “My work is very American. It's like: I'm gonna do it, do something that's my culture, but also do it my way and that's individual.”

Nassar has travelled often to Palestine, and the process behind his work engages with the challenges linked to Israel’s occupation – even if he does not make this explicit. He designs the panels and then commissions the embroideries from craftswomen living in the West Bank. But it can take weeks to have the works taken out of the West Bank and posted to the US. “There’s definitely a consideration of doing things early and assuming that everything is going to have a delay. It can't be tight deadlines,” he said. “First I buy the fabric and ship it to the workshop in Ramallah, because I want this specific fabric,” he said. A friend picks up the finished embroideries and has them driven from the West Bank to Tel Aviv, then Jaffa. Then, a friend in Jaffa posts the fabrics by regular mail to the US – which Nassar says is the simplest step in the process. “She just breaks it up into boxes and sends it in Israel Post, and it honestly comes so fast,” he said. “That’s way faster than trying to ship it from Palestine.”

The second part of the exhibition reflects on archaeology and the politics of cultural heritage in conflict. A series of hand-cut glass mosaics, inspired by those of the Byzantine church in Jabalia, Gaza, depict an orange tree, a lion, a man and patterning from the original church. Local archaeologists in Gaza say the church was damaged by Israeli shelling. “It has been damaged for sure in the bombing, but we don't know the extent, so it may not be there at all any more,” said Nassar.

Nassar’s interest in Byzantine mosaics came from seeing two panels at Ben Gurion International Airport that had been extracted from a church in what is now northern Israel. “That led into this investigation into the use of archaeology and antiquities, not only for propaganda, but for land grabbing,” he said. He also refers to the Roman and Byzantine ruins of Sabastia near Nablus, which Israel recently announced it would expropriate and develop into a tourism hub. “Israel is claiming that they're preserving a historical site. Concurrently, that means that they would have to block off Palestinian access, take more land, and build roads to these sites that then are bifurcating Palestinian land,” he said.

Nassar therefore hopes these recreations of the works can be enjoyed outside of these hotly politicised contexts. “They exist outside of being used as propaganda. They can just exist as something for themselves for their own sake,” he said. “I'm not trying to mimic something that looks 2,000 years old. I'm also not trying to match every single colour and try to be perfect. I'm definitely taking liberties,” he said.

Nassar wants his work to be “universal” and an expression of daily life, rather than didactic. “Art is about sharing this human experience with other people,” he said. “I'm not trying to make informational work about Palestine because that's not what art is for me,” he said. “I am very opinionated about activism and art. I don't really know if art is the best venue for these things. For me, it's more about human connection,” he said. “It doesn't matter where your family is from. If you have this diaspora experience, hopefully you feel a connection.”