Nour Elbery

Artist Statement

I work with architectures that offer no resolution and with procedures that anticipate the body, orient its movement, and delimit its visibility. My practice encompasses sculpture, installation, and performance, engaging with the thresholds where spatial and bureaucratic systems of order begin to slip.

I work with materials that include those that are meant to endure and those that vanish as they unfold. Vibration, gesture, and voice enter the work not as symbols but as operations — ways of framing the body or refusing legibility. What binds these inquiries is an attention to friction: where function exceeds itself, where repetition distorts rather than affirms, where participation strains the very structure that invites it.

I inhabit objects, rhythms, and spatial logics that shape visibility, access, and desire. The works slip between recognition and refusal. In this context, bureaucracy is embodied, experienced slowly, durationally, sometimes absurdly. These are not acts of protest but of pressure.

Permeable Transactions (2025)
Installation
Mild steel, thermal paper, sound, car seat, belt barriers, screen, algorithmic interface, voice

Call Pest Control (2025)
Installation
Text, mild steel, PLA

Across Cairo, highways slice through dense informal neighborhoods formed in the name of city expansion. The military-led National Roads Company manages a proliferating network of toll gates, transforming movement into debt. Their purpose is not surveillance; it is extraction. Roads are carved with brutal precision across the landscape, expanding outward in every direction. In their path, homes are halved, stairwells exposed, balconies torn from facades. Entire neighborhoods are erased or rerouted, communities displaced without negotiation. Participation is mandatory. Movement becomes currency. To pass is to pay, to pay is to perpetuate. 

Permeable Transactions presents a parallel system of forced exchange. Participants offer a need or a desire to a fictional entity — Permeable Transactions LLC — and in return, they receive a poetic fragment. Permeable Transactions LLC monetizes it, prints it on thermal receipt paper, and bills it to the National Roads Company. An algorithm drives the fiction, an engine that automates longing, distills affect into syntax, and processes intimacy through machine logic. Each receipt marks the offering before folding it back into the machine. The work unfolds as a five-hour performance within a hybrid structure — part toll booth, part kiosk, part car — positioned between function and theater. A screen replaces the face; hands operate from behind glass. Lines drawn by belt barriers guide, restrict, separate. Here, code becomes both instrument and witness, training the body through repetition until gesture dissolves into script.