Nadia Kaabi-Linke

Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s sculptures and installations examine narratives of migration and otherness, and scrutinize the local historical contexts of their development. Kaabi-Linke’s works, which incorporate material traces like paint chips and cobwebs from her sites of analysis, make a forensic argument that power is at once the West’s most successful export — in the form of its absolutist expressions and its corollaries like racism and colonialism — as well as its most vigorously hoarded resource. By uncloaking obscured narratives — secrecy and historical erasures being some of power’s most effective tools of subjugation — Kaabi-Linke elucidates the mechanisms that contributed to the rise of past oppressive systems and which allow them to continue to thrive today. (Recipient of the 4th Ithra Art Prize, Dhahran in 2021).