12a Bourdon St, W1K 3PG, London, United Kingdom
Open: Tue-Sat 11am-6pm
Artist: Nour Mobarak
Sylvia Kouvali presents That That, an exhibition of new work by Nour Mobarak (b. 1985, Cairo, Egypt, lives and works in Bainbridge Island, Washington). Mobarak's multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, sound, performance and moving image, exploring the unstable relationship between voice, language and the body. Combining organic and synthetic materials, That That challenges distinctions between the human and non-human, the present and the absent, the living and the dead.
For her third exhibition with the gallery, Mobarak presents new works from her Recto Verso series, recently presented at the Whitney Biennial 2026, alongside the sculpture Reproductive Logistics V. Drawing on casts of her buttocks, these relief works reduce physical presence into a tablet through which light, colour and space are explored. Rather than presenting the body as fixed or stable, Recto Verso imagines it as continually reconstituted through material transformation.
Mobarak describes her Recto Verso series as a return to the body. Against a backdrop of global and personal uncertainty, the artist transforms her own body into an abstract geometric form. Through this, she explores experiences of alienation and displacement, shaped by war, insecurity, suburban life and citizenship; connecting personal experience with wider histories of upheaval and loss.
Within these works, colour functions as more than a surface attribute; it becomes an active material. Liquid pigments are suspended within epoxy resin, creating shifting fields of chromatic translucence. As light passes through the resin, colours bleed, pool, superimpose and refract, producing subtle variations that change according to the viewer's position and the surrounding environment. This emphasis on colour recalls traditions of abstract painting while simultaneously foregrounding the physical properties of the sculptural medium.
The saturated reds, ambers, violets and smoky blues present in the work, evoke bodily associations such as flesh, blood, bruising and internal organs. Rather than defining fixed forms, colour remains unstable and fluid, emphasizing the works’ tension between figuration and abstraction. Within these works Mobarak transforms her imprint into an immersive field of sensation, where emotion, memory and physicality are conveyed through luminosity, transparency and chromatic intensity.
In Reproductive Logistics V, Mobarak created a cast of her pregnant torso from saprophytic mycelium, the root-like structure of a fungus that feeds on dead matter. The work explores the idea of the human body not as an isolated individual, but as an ecosystem inhabited by thousands of microorganisms. An exercise in giving form to death and decomposition, Mobarak’s Reproductive Logistics series considers the relationship between life, death and reproduction. By growing the mycelium within a cast of her own body, Mobarak reflects on the ways reproduction is managed and controlled today, from IVF and abortion to egg freezing and the timing of fertility.
Mobarak studied Vocational Credits in Film and Digital Editing and Cinematography at NWFilm Center, Portland, Oregon (2008). She holds a Certification in Civilization & Art History, Cours de Civilisation Francaise de la Sorbonne, Paris (2007) and a BA w/ Honours in English Literature & Media Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, England (2006).
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