Filwa Nazer

b. 1960, Beirut, Lebanon; lives in Montreal, Canada

Filwa Nazer is a Saudi Arabian multimedia artist. Having started her creative journey as a fashion designer, her current practice ranges from digital print, collage, and textiles, to appropriation of photography. Her work centers around questioning emotional and psychological identity in relation to spatial and social contexts.

Nazer’s work In The Fold  is interested in mutability, drawing parallels between mimicry and camouflage in the insect world and the way human beings adapt socially, assimilating with different groups for good or ill. The work is inspired by French intellectual, sociologist and critic Roger Caillois’s research where he likens the ways certain insects use camouflage as a defense tactic to the psychotic who is unable to determine her or his own location in space. Using cotton fabrics that vary in their transparency and stiffness, including tarlatan and cotton wadding, the installation is aesthetically inspired by the anatomy of insects that mimic their environment and are found in Saudi Arabia such as the Blue-shinned grasshopper and the Oleander Hawk-moth; as well as pattern lines from traditional garments.