Nuveen Barwari, Kurdish artist
Nuveen Barwari is an artist who gathers and repurposes artifacts from her community, such as worn Kurdish clothes, fabric, and used rugs, alongside materials from America, to explore their inherited histories and cultural meanings. She explores shapes and symbols that emerge from living between clashing cultures and languages.
Through a combination of collage, painting, textiles, and installation, she works with the intricacies of assimilation, material culture, and the contradictions of diasporic identities. Her work often moves between the decorative and the interrogative, as she unravels cultural symbols, redraws borders, and reimagines the space between homeland and host land.
Barwari also draws deeply on Kurdish poetry, especially its imaginary and world-building elements. Fragmented and imagined landscapes are tied to resistance and survival. By piecing together architectural fragments, shapes, and textiles, she evokes the boundaries between reality and imagination, home and exile. She invites viewers into a reconstructed world that blurs the lines between memory and invention, much as Kurdish poetry reimagines the homeland through a symbolic, often dreamlike lens.
Nuveen Barwari was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and grew up in Duhok, South Kurdistan. She received her MFA from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 2022 and her BS in Art from Tennessee State University in 2019. She has shown at Zg Gallery (Illinois), NGBK Gallery in Berlin, Germany, Duhok Gallery, Ortega y Gasset Projects (New York), Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery (Tennesse), and Art Toronto Canada’s Art Fair. Barwari was the 2023 fellow in the Skidmore Art’s Department’s Workspace Residency Program. Her work has been featured in the Nashville Scene, New American Painting, Yahoo Nachrichten Deutschland, Gazete Duvar, and Botan Times. She currently resides in Albany, New York.
Works by Nuveen Bawari were exhibited in the group show Meet Me Here Tomorrow (Again), curated by Heike Dempster at the All Street Gallery, 77 East Third Street, New York NY 10003. For more information, visit the website.
