Al Thahira — Nahla Tabbaa

Work About Contact

Al Thahira الظهيرة (2025)

Hand painted silk tapestry with natural dyes
Naturally dyed silk and cotton soft sculpture

This series is a recurring memory fragment that reemerges time and time again in my practice, but also exist in the wild landscapes of the region I grew up in. Rocks peppered across hills, holding and containing eroding soil, dust and age, holding tiny ecosystems. And a sun that holds 24 names in Arabic, each aptly describing the strength and colors of the sun.

My work tries to embody these names. Lately, I had been drawn to الظهيرة—midday—when the light is at its harshest, yet also at its most powerful. In this work, I consider her as both a force of intensity and a harshness. She casts her light upon a rock, and from that seemingly unyielding surface, and a flower emerges. The formulaic conditions of the sun as light hardness, the rock as a container, and travelling seeds that pollinate and incubate, life is born.

Tender Refusals (2025)

Naturally dyed silk soft sculptures
Dimensions: varied

When a flower emerges from a rock, or a single weed attaches itself to a tree, I witness the beginnings of an isolated ecosystem, small, yet vast enough to gesture toward the cosmos. In the nothingness of a rock formation, encapsulating layers upon layer of sediments, alchemising the world’s age, it has the ability to provide a surface, hard and strong enough to invite an attachment and adhesion. Lichen, moss and eventually roots.

In this work, the rocks embody refusal: they do not move, they do not yield. Yet their resistance is softened, tendered, by the ethereal presence of flowers, namely the Cyclamin (زعمطوط), a lilac flower with veiny leafs that are edible and medicinal.

The sculptures hover above the ground, inviting the contemplation of weightlessness. These floating forms suggest a quiet negotiation between hardness and fragility, endurance and ephemerality, resistance and offering, all elements at play in our world and the cosmos.