A Shroud is a Cloth: Adrian Pepe at NIKA Project Space, Dubai
From 30 January to 17 May 2025, NIKA Project Space in Dubai hosts A Shroud is a Cloth, a solo exhibition by fibre artist Adrian Pepe. Based in Beirut and born in Honduras in 1984, Pepe’s practice spans textiles, installation, and performance, exploring the relationships between material, memory, and cultural landscapes. His work often begins with raw, unprocessed materials - wool, plant matter, animal byproducts - and evolves through acts of transformation that connect process with place.
Adrian Pepe. Entangled Matters. Exhibition View. Beirut. 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
At the centre of the exhibition is a 200-square-metre woollen textile, originally used to wrap a heritage building in Beirut damaged by the 2020 port explosion.
“Wool has this capacity to hold time - it is resilient yet malleable, intimate yet expansive,” says Pepe. “In this exhibition, I am exploring how materials are never neutral; they shape, and are shaped by care, labor, and the environments they inhabit.”
This cloth forms the basis for a series of new works, ranging in scale from intimate to monumental. Using techniques such as felting, stitching, and layering, Pepe reconfigures the material into votive objects, map-like compositions, and sculptural forms. Preserved within the wool are seed diaspores, dirt, and vegetal debris - residues that reference both the environment from which the material came and the histories it has passed through.
Adrian Pepe. Entangled Matters. Fragment, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Pepe’s approach is rooted in a close engagement with process. He frequently works in collaboration with artisans, farmers, and shepherds, building direct relationships with the sources of his materials. His previous projects include Utility of Being at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, created from the pelts of Awassi sheep, and Entangled Matters 2.0, which covered the façade of Beirut’s Villa des Palmes in hand-felted wool as part of UNESCO’s post-blast recovery programme.
A Shroud is a Cloth continues Pepe’s longstanding collaboration with NIKA Project Space, and invites viewers to reflect on the movements of material across time, geography, and cultural context.
As part of our coverage, Selvedge is pleased to feature Adrian Pepe in our Five Minutes with a Friend interview series, offering a closer look at the ideas, rituals, and experiences that shape his work:
Adrian, what is your first memory of a textile?
One of my earliest memories involves my sister’s cotton diapers - soft, hand-washed, and fastened with metal pins. They were simple, utilitarian, and completely integrated into daily life. It wasn’t “textile” in the artistic sense, but it left a tactile impression.
Can you put into words what you love about textiles?
Their versatility. The way textiles can absorb, conceal, wrap, or reveal. They exist at the intersection of skin and structure - both intimate and architectural. There’s also an openness in the medium; it doesn’t insist on one reading.
Adrian Pepe. Untitled. 2023 Embroidered felt, mixed media 147 x 147 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Where is your most inspiring space or place to create?
Close to the source - where the material begins. That might be a rural landscape, a field, or a farm. Places where wool is still on the body of the animal, or where plants haven’t yet been harvested. I’m most inspired when I’m working in proximity to rawness.
Adrian Pepe, Untitled, 2023.
What has inspired you recently?
The exhibition Science/Fiction — A Non-History of Plants at the MEP in Paris. It explored the visual and conceptual history of plants through both scientific and speculative lenses - tracing how we’ve tried to observe, classify, and control the vegetal world. What stayed with me was the idea of plants as agents, not just subjects - beings with their own intelligence, rhythms, and ways of resisting human systems.
Adrian Pepe. Aegilops Tauschi #3. 2023. Embroidered textile trapped in felt dyed in red ochre. Courtesy of the artist.
What is your most cherished textile, and why?
I’m not sure I have one cherished textile. At the moment, I’m quite attached to a tote bag I received during the Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2023. It’s made from a single pair of jeans - recycled denim sourced in Kampala, Uganda, by Buzigahill. I’ve carried it everywhere on my current trip in Honduras. It’s humble, but layered.
Where did you learn your craft?
I’m still learning. My practice crosses disciplines, so I’m constantly experimenting - testing out techniques, adapting them, sometimes bending them into something unrecognisable. I learn through material, through failure, and through the people I meet along the way.
Adrian Pepe. A Shroud is a Cloth, 2025. Exhibition view. Photo by Liana Mukhamedzianova. Courtesy of NIKA Project Space.
-
Further Information:
A Shroud is a Cloth runs until 17 May 2025 at NIKA Project Space, Dubai.
Read more about Adrian Pepe in Selvedge Issue 108, Farm.
Image Credits:
Lead Image: Adrian Pepe, 2022. Photo courtesy of the artist.
All other images as credited in the captions.