Nassar's Embroidery: A Global Supply Chain in Stitch

Fabric bought in the US, shipped to a workshop in Ramallah, then carried by a friend from the West Bank to Tel Aviv and Jaffa, and posted to America through Israel’s regular mail: the supply chain behind Jordan Nassar’s embroidered landscapes is as intricate as the stitching itself. The artist calls that final leg the simplest step. “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.” Export delays from the West Bank, which can stretch to weeks, shape the whole operation. “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.

That logistics-heavy production model is now on view in the UK. The Third Line, a Dubai gallery, is presenting Nassar at No 9 Cork Street in London, the New York artist’s first showing in Britain in a decade. For a gallery operating out of the Gulf art market, the London presentation marks a bid to place a diaspora artist before collectors and institutions at a moment when interest in Palestinian cultural production is high.

Nassar, who was born in Manhattan, works with tatreez, the Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery tradition, combining it with invented landscapes. The piece They Build Homes with Clouds (2026) sets green, red and purple-hued mountains against an ochre sky, with the sea beyond, embroidered on canvas and framed by four smaller panels of colourful square motifs. The contrast between tatreez’s repetitive geometry and the organic shapes of the mountains is startling. The panels are moveable and appear in distinct geometrical forms inspired by the Iranian-American artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, whose Convertibles series used a similar modular method and whose style fused mirror-mosaic technique with the postwar abstract expressionism she encountered as a student in New York.

The artist frames the 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. The sunny, arid scenes could equally come from an American road movie crossing the Mojave or Sonoran deserts.

Nassar’s marketable identity is itself a product of New York. His father is of Palestinian heritage, his mother Polish, and he grew up in a city that embraced its role as gateway to a nation of immigrants. “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. His paternal grandfather migrated to the US in the 1910s, before the Nakba, and became a central figure in establishing the Arab American community in Yonkers, later sponsoring the arrival of hundreds of displaced families. Yet assimilation came first: the grandfather opened a cafe selling hamburgers and milkshakes and never taught his children Arabic. “In the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, the mindset was: we’re American now, so we speak English,” Nassar said. Questions of belonging now run through 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. “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.”

Meanwhile, the show’s second section turns to archaeology and the politics of cultural heritage, a domain where ownership and control carry real economic weight. A series of hand-cut glass mosaics, inspired by the Byzantine church in Jabalia, Gaza, depict an orange tree, a lion, a man and patterning from the original church, which local archaeologists in Gaza say 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,” Nassar said. His interest began at Ben Gurion International Airport, where he saw two panels 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 points 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 hopes his recreations can exist outside such politicised contexts, taken on their own terms rather than as replicas or arguments. “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. He wants the work to be universal rather than didactic. “Art is about sharing this human experience with other people. 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. It doesn’t matter where your family is from. If you have this diaspora experience, hopefully you feel a connection.”

The poet Mahmoud Darwish once wrote of his frustration at being unable to describe a cloud, seeing in them “a white idea about the meaning of existence”. That poem, and Darwish’s failing words, guide this new series. For the galleries and collectors encountering it in London, it arrives as both art object and artefact of a diaspora economy, stitched in the West Bank, shipped through Tel Aviv, and priced for an international market. Whether that market sustains a first British showing in a decade into something longer-term may depend on how collectors weigh beauty against the politics stitched into it.