A Shroud is a Cloth
Text by Rahel Aima
A shroud is a cloth. A shroud obscures, but it also protects what is underneath. A shroud cradles that which it covers at a time of transition, a transmutation from one state to another. Above all, a shroud is indexical: it says that something once came from the land, was severed from it, and will now be returned to the land. The human that is made of clay and mud returns to clay and mud; ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
A textile is in itself an expression of the landscape it comes from. It has a terroir that is reflected in its texture: the diameter of each strand and its crimp, which in turn affects its softness or coarseness and insulating properties. Among animal fibres, wool is especially remarkable for its ability to absorb moisture without getting wet; put another way, it is uniquely able to not just reflect its terroir, but carry its atmosphere with it. And while we tend to think of terroir as climate, soil composition, and the particular grasses that an animal might eat, we should extend our understanding to other elements, namely the accumulation of culture and history that is as much a part of any terrain as its mineral content.
As the animal grazes, its hair, fur, or wool also accumulates its surrounding landscape, picking up burrs which have co-evolved to have a commensalistic relationship with the animal that carries and deposits these seeds elsewhere, ensuring biodiversity. Humans, in turn, have manipulated these animal fibres as clothing and as shelter, resulting in morphological changes over time as the body evolves to adapt to new climates. In his textile-based practice, Adrian Pepe primarily works with wool from Awassi sheep, an ancient fat-tailed breed that has been reared in its native Mesopotamia and Levant for over 5000 years. It is the ur-sheep of Abrahamic religions and ritualistic practices, slaughtered to celebrate births or honour guests, and sacrificed on holy days and holidays, with their livers used for divination. As such, its wool grows from a symbolically fertile ground, laden with the weight of mythology, civilisational history, and creationist narratives.
Drawing parallels to the Mayan notion of the world existing on the back of a turtle, Pepe’s work is grounded in the recognition that a whole ecosystem exists on the backs of animals too. He describes the process of turning a fleece—a shorn biomass of wool, parasites, insects and plant matter—into material, hair into wool, as an extractive process of removing the landscape from it. More recently, he has begun to separate out and classify these elements to create a kind of visual taxonomy of the wool’s terroir. Using animal collagen and medical grade preservatives, these bits of landscape are tightly bound together into matted expressions of a territory LANDSCAPE MATTER that are hung on the gallery wall, or looser, fossilised amberlike tiles VEGETABLE MATTER that are displayed on x-ray lightboxes, suggesting a primordial soup of plant matter floating in animal matter. Also on view is a video from the cataloguing process, which navigates the debris using a powerful microscopic lens, moving ever downward to produce a visceral, endoscopic exploration.Taken together, they create a certain forensic aesthetic—the modern-day organ divination—but what is being dissected here is not human flesh so much as the landscape itself.
In summer 2024, Pepe wrapped the Villa des Palmes, a heritage building severely damaged in the Beirut port explosion, in handmade felted wool. Unlike the hermetic seal of a coffin, a shroud is a semi-permeable membrane that allows for the passage of air, moisture, microbes, and the forces of time and here, too, the covering is stretched thin like yuba. In using a material long used to dress wounds, the intervention drew parallels between urban and fleshy bodies, and their different processes of treatment and repair. When we heal a broken structure, we try to restore it to a state of former glory. When we renovate the human body, however, the most we can do is stem the tide of decay. Draped over a building, this single, multi-panelled textile operates like the green or brown safety mesh over scaffolding we might be more used to seeing but unlike the fixity of this netting, the shroud billows and sighs in the breeze, revealing the fragility and vulnerability of the decimated form it covers.
At Nika, this monumental 200 square meter textile is hung in the anterior space, greeting visitors as they enter the space to form the heart of the show. Removed from the building-as-corpse, it invokes the living bodies that it once originated from, with each panel using approximately the amount of wool produced by a single sheep. Yet installed in a white cube, the shroud doesn’t suggest a return to the earth, to the landscape, so much as the cold clinicality of the mortuary. Moving from the shroud towards the shroud,main space then, creates an unsettling play on scale as the visitor moves from product to representations of the landscape it is extracted from.
As for the absent body that the shroud intimates? It has already made its way upstairs, in the form of Shedding (2023), a life sized cast of the artist’s body, laid out on a morguelike slab. The piece is the aftermath—an afterbirth as well as an shroud—of a 12-hour durational performance in which performers clad in disposable blue hazmat suits wet and felted wool directly onto Pepe’s body in an exploration of funerary rites and a millenia-long history ovine-human symbiosis. This shedded snakeskin analogue reverberates across floors in the jute netting that used to sag and fall off a building in Pepe’s Beirut neighbourhood like scabs. They are sutured together with felted wool in a series of works URBAN SHROUDS that further collapses the distance between shroud and safety textiles, and between the urban and human bodies.
The transformative process of healing is further viscerally intimated in works EX VOTOS that references childhood memories of Pepe’s father’s orthopedic clinic, as well as a Costa Rican pilgrimage tradition. Both are ritualised sites of profound faith and a very human yearning for repair, whether in the sympathetic magic of a basilica Chamber of Miracles, or the performed rationality of modern medicine. At the end of the pilgrimage, devotees make small golden and silver medallions depicting ailing body parts which are hung on a particular wall as a way to ask for improved health or another boon, or mounted in gratitude for healing, or another benediction received. But here, human body parts are interspersed with animal ones, suggesting a kind of hybrid interspecies structuring.nThere is an understanding here that healing must necessarily be collective—we can’t get better alone—but also, fascinatingly, might require the built environment too. As a whole, the show suggests the locavorist maxim that what grows together grows together. The “three sisters” of corn, beans, and squash, for example, or tomatoes, eggplants and zucchinis. Or more precisely, what grows together should be shown together: shrouded, shed, and finally stitched together.
Text by Rahel Aima
A shroud is a cloth. A shroud obscures, but it also protects what is underneath. A shroud cradles that which it covers at a time of transition, a transmutation from one state to another. Above all, a shroud is indexical: it says that something once came from the land, was severed from it, and will now be returned to the land. The human that is made of clay and mud returns to clay and mud; ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
A textile is in itself an expression of the landscape it comes from. It has a terroir that is reflected in its texture: the diameter of each strand and its crimp, which in turn affects its softness or coarseness and insulating properties. Among animal fibres, wool is especially remarkable for its ability to absorb moisture without getting wet; put another way, it is uniquely able to not just reflect its terroir, but carry its atmosphere with it. And while we tend to think of terroir as climate, soil composition, and the particular grasses that an animal might eat, we should extend our understanding to other elements, namely the accumulation of culture and history that is as much a part of any terrain as its mineral content.
As the animal grazes, its hair, fur, or wool also accumulates its surrounding landscape, picking up burrs which have co-evolved to have a commensalistic relationship with the animal that carries and deposits these seeds elsewhere, ensuring biodiversity. Humans, in turn, have manipulated these animal fibres as clothing and as shelter, resulting in morphological changes over time as the body evolves to adapt to new climates. In his textile-based practice, Adrian Pepe primarily works with wool from Awassi sheep, an ancient fat-tailed breed that has been reared in its native Mesopotamia and Levant for over 5000 years. It is the ur-sheep of Abrahamic religions and ritualistic practices, slaughtered to celebrate births or honour guests, and sacrificed on holy days and holidays, with their livers used for divination. As such, its wool grows from a symbolically fertile ground, laden with the weight of mythology, civilisational history, and creationist narratives.
Drawing parallels to the Mayan notion of the world existing on the back of a turtle, Pepe’s work is grounded in the recognition that a whole ecosystem exists on the backs of animals too. He describes the process of turning a fleece—a shorn biomass of wool, parasites, insects and plant matter—into material, hair into wool, as an extractive process of removing the landscape from it. More recently, he has begun to separate out and classify these elements to create a kind of visual taxonomy of the wool’s terroir. Using animal collagen and medical grade preservatives, these bits of landscape are tightly bound together into matted expressions of a territory LANDSCAPE MATTER that are hung on the gallery wall, or looser, fossilised amberlike tiles VEGETABLE MATTER that are displayed on x-ray lightboxes, suggesting a primordial soup of plant matter floating in animal matter. Also on view is a video from the cataloguing process, which navigates the debris using a powerful microscopic lens, moving ever downward to produce a visceral, endoscopic exploration.Taken together, they create a certain forensic aesthetic—the modern-day organ divination—but what is being dissected here is not human flesh so much as the landscape itself.
In summer 2024, Pepe wrapped the Villa des Palmes, a heritage building severely damaged in the Beirut port explosion, in handmade felted wool. Unlike the hermetic seal of a coffin, a shroud is a semi-permeable membrane that allows for the passage of air, moisture, microbes, and the forces of time and here, too, the covering is stretched thin like yuba. In using a material long used to dress wounds, the intervention drew parallels between urban and fleshy bodies, and their different processes of treatment and repair. When we heal a broken structure, we try to restore it to a state of former glory. When we renovate the human body, however, the most we can do is stem the tide of decay. Draped over a building, this single, multi-panelled textile operates like the green or brown safety mesh over scaffolding we might be more used to seeing but unlike the fixity of this netting, the shroud billows and sighs in the breeze, revealing the fragility and vulnerability of the decimated form it covers.
At Nika, this monumental 200 square meter textile is hung in the anterior space, greeting visitors as they enter the space to form the heart of the show. Removed from the building-as-corpse, it invokes the living bodies that it once originated from, with each panel using approximately the amount of wool produced by a single sheep. Yet installed in a white cube, the shroud doesn’t suggest a return to the earth, to the landscape, so much as the cold clinicality of the mortuary. Moving from the shroud towards the shroud,main space then, creates an unsettling play on scale as the visitor moves from product to representations of the landscape it is extracted from.
As for the absent body that the shroud intimates? It has already made its way upstairs, in the form of Shedding (2023), a life sized cast of the artist’s body, laid out on a morguelike slab. The piece is the aftermath—an afterbirth as well as an shroud—of a 12-hour durational performance in which performers clad in disposable blue hazmat suits wet and felted wool directly onto Pepe’s body in an exploration of funerary rites and a millenia-long history ovine-human symbiosis. This shedded snakeskin analogue reverberates across floors in the jute netting that used to sag and fall off a building in Pepe’s Beirut neighbourhood like scabs. They are sutured together with felted wool in a series of works URBAN SHROUDS that further collapses the distance between shroud and safety textiles, and between the urban and human bodies.
The transformative process of healing is further viscerally intimated in works EX VOTOS that references childhood memories of Pepe’s father’s orthopedic clinic, as well as a Costa Rican pilgrimage tradition. Both are ritualised sites of profound faith and a very human yearning for repair, whether in the sympathetic magic of a basilica Chamber of Miracles, or the performed rationality of modern medicine. At the end of the pilgrimage, devotees make small golden and silver medallions depicting ailing body parts which are hung on a particular wall as a way to ask for improved health or another boon, or mounted in gratitude for healing, or another benediction received. But here, human body parts are interspersed with animal ones, suggesting a kind of hybrid interspecies structuring.nThere is an understanding here that healing must necessarily be collective—we can’t get better alone—but also, fascinatingly, might require the built environment too. As a whole, the show suggests the locavorist maxim that what grows together grows together. The “three sisters” of corn, beans, and squash, for example, or tomatoes, eggplants and zucchinis. Or more precisely, what grows together should be shown together: shrouded, shed, and finally stitched together.
ENTANGLED MATTERS 2.0 was a public art installation and exhibition that involved wrapping a building, severely impacted by the Beirut Port Explosion, in hand-felted wool produced in Lebanon. Felt, one of the oldest textile-making techniques, has historically served purposes such as shelter, clothing, and wound-healing. This installation explores the potential of this indigenous material to convey a message of repair and renewal following trauma, drawing parallels between the urban and human bodies.
The exhibition inside the wrapped building featured wall hangings, inflated soft sculptures that traversed the space like viscera, and a performance, all reflecting the complex interactions between humans and non-human entities. By engaging with the concepts of inside and outside, the project delves into the boundaries of trauma, exploring how it permeates both living and nonliving entities.
The exhibition inside the wrapped building featured wall hangings, inflated soft sculptures that traversed the space like viscera, and a performance, all reflecting the complex interactions between humans and non-human entities. By engaging with the concepts of inside and outside, the project delves into the boundaries of trauma, exploring how it permeates both living and nonliving entities.
THE GILDED FLEECE draws inspiration from the theme of the Golden Fleece, one of the oldest myths of a hero’s journey: the quest of a young man and his crew to find the unthinkable, a magical golden fleece guarded by mythical creatures. The driven, singular pursuit for one thing or experience is familiar to all; the thirst to procure a valued material that is desperately needed in order to maintain power, status, wealth, and desire, at all costs. The willingness to embark on such a journey to the unknown exposes oneself to the elements, laying bare the soft belly.
The work is composed of twelve tanned skins of adult Awassi sheep that were cut rectilinearly and connected industrially with an accordion stitch. The reticular side of this composition of sheep skins is prepared and lathered with the refined collagen of rabbit, otherwise known as rabbit glue, in preparation to adopt a thin layer of 24 karat gold leaf, handled and positioned using a series of brushes made of horse and squirrel hair. Exposing the sheep, the rabbit, the house and the squirrel in the process.
Final image by Edmund Summer
UTILITY OF BEING is
a site-specific installation conceived from the gathered pelts of the fat-tailed Awassi sheep—a natural byproduct of the slaughtering
process
in the region. Staged within the historic Old Slaughterhouse of the
Emirate of Sharjah, the installation comprises of pneumatic tubular forms echoing the visceral lines of animal entrails. The continuously
inflated bodies penetrate and traverse the space while suspended from the hooks and rails originally used for handling animal carcasses. The work serves as a metaphor for
understanding the tension
that lies at the edge of survival and commerce,
challenging notions of human-animal relationality, the alchemy of material processes, and the fragility of
biological existence.
Images by Danko Stjepanovic coutersy of Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Alessandro Fagioli, and Omar Al Gurg
Disclaimer:
The animals whose skins are presented in this installation were not killed for the production of this work. The collected skins are stitched together and then inflated using internal air blowers; no plastic or PVC casing was used in the installation.
As a closure, we held a ceremonial bagpipe procession at the Old Slaughterhouse of Sharjah, commemorating the fat-tailed Awassi sheep. The bagpipe, or ḥabbān (هبان), traditionally crafted from a singular animal skin, becomes a lyrical vessel, carrying a rich history rooted in the region. A musical spell from the world of shepherds, the piper grants a voice to the animal while manipulating its aerated body.
Against the backdrop of the UTILITY OF BEING installation, featuring inflated forms made of sheepskins, a metaphor unfolds—an interplay of artifact and ritual—binding humans and animals in a dialectical interconnectedness.
Images by Danko Stjepanovic coutersy of Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Alessandro Fagioli, and Omar Al Gurg
Disclaimer:
The animals whose skins are presented in this installation were not killed for the production of this work. The collected skins are stitched together and then inflated using internal air blowers; no plastic or PVC casing was used in the installation.
As a closure, we held a ceremonial bagpipe procession at the Old Slaughterhouse of Sharjah, commemorating the fat-tailed Awassi sheep. The bagpipe, or ḥabbān (هبان), traditionally crafted from a singular animal skin, becomes a lyrical vessel, carrying a rich history rooted in the region. A musical spell from the world of shepherds, the piper grants a voice to the animal while manipulating its aerated body.
Against the backdrop of the UTILITY OF BEING installation, featuring inflated forms made of sheepskins, a metaphor unfolds—an interplay of artifact and ritual—binding humans and animals in a dialectical interconnectedness.
SHEDDING is a life sized cast made of felted sheep wool resulting from the artists’ exploration of funerary rituals as an act of re-birth. The work takes the form of an effigy, capturing the likeness of the artist, a form of self portraiture.
The cast is created through a participatory process in which the wool is laid and assembled directly onto the body, consequently wetted and felted by the hands of others. Felt is an ancient task entailing the compression and entangling of animal fibers through friction, moisture, and heat—it is considered the oldest form of textile making. Through this communal ritual, intimate association transpires between bodies, both human and other-than-human, as the biomass of the sheep becomes formed into an impression of a human body, raveling and unraveling conceptions of self and other, life and death, hinting at Derrida’s discourse on the auto-biographical animal, ‘The Animal That I Therefore Am’.
Having worked with fibrous materials to create momentous tapestries, this particular intervention extends to a personal act of self actualization. The white wool envelopes the human body in the form of a cocoon which consequently sheds; mimicking nature’s performativity of transformation. The body’s emergence from this process of assimilation with the sheep creating lasting impressions on all bodies.
The cast is finally displayed alongside a divergent archeology of mundane and natural artifacts from plastic bags to snake skins coined ‘sheddings’, collected by the artist during his stay in KSA, suggesting their dialectical interrelations. The found objects are juxtaposed as things in themselves and in relation to each other, becoming animate/empowered agents within a larger narrative, no longer passive or lacking purpose.
Text by Tara Al Dugaither
During Intermix, an art residency for the Saudi Ministry of Culture, the Visual Arts Commission and the Fashion Commission
The cast is created through a participatory process in which the wool is laid and assembled directly onto the body, consequently wetted and felted by the hands of others. Felt is an ancient task entailing the compression and entangling of animal fibers through friction, moisture, and heat—it is considered the oldest form of textile making. Through this communal ritual, intimate association transpires between bodies, both human and other-than-human, as the biomass of the sheep becomes formed into an impression of a human body, raveling and unraveling conceptions of self and other, life and death, hinting at Derrida’s discourse on the auto-biographical animal, ‘The Animal That I Therefore Am’.
Having worked with fibrous materials to create momentous tapestries, this particular intervention extends to a personal act of self actualization. The white wool envelopes the human body in the form of a cocoon which consequently sheds; mimicking nature’s performativity of transformation. The body’s emergence from this process of assimilation with the sheep creating lasting impressions on all bodies.
The cast is finally displayed alongside a divergent archeology of mundane and natural artifacts from plastic bags to snake skins coined ‘sheddings’, collected by the artist during his stay in KSA, suggesting their dialectical interrelations. The found objects are juxtaposed as things in themselves and in relation to each other, becoming animate/empowered agents within a larger narrative, no longer passive or lacking purpose.
Text by Tara Al Dugaither
During Intermix, an art residency for the Saudi Ministry of Culture, the Visual Arts Commission and the Fashion Commission
