Israeli occupation delays the embroidery Jordan Nassar commissions from craftswomen in the West Bank, shaping how he plans and moves his work. His first UK exhibition in a decade is on view at No 9 Cork Street in London, presented by Dubai gallery The Third Line. It places imagined Palestinian landscapes beside glass mosaics inspired by a church in Gaza damaged by Israeli shelling.
The routes the work must take
Nassar designs the tatreez panels and commissions craftswomen in the West Bank to embroider them. He buys the fabric and ships it to a workshop in Ramallah. Delays tied to Israel’s occupation mean he plans for the work to take longer and avoids tight deadlines.
The finished panels then travel through a chain of personal connections. A friend collects the embroidery and drives it from the West Bank to Tel Aviv, then Jaffa. From there, a friend mails the fabric to the United States. “She just breaks it up into boxes and sends it in Israel Post, and it honestly comes so fast,” Nassar said. “That’s way faster than trying to ship it from Palestine.” It’s a practical route, but it also lays bare the constraints around ordinary work: even cloth commissioned for an exhibition must be planned around occupation-related delays.
The 2026 panel “They Build Homes with Clouds” sets green, red and purple mountains against an ochre sky and sea. Four smaller panels, covered in colourful square patterns, surround it. Nassar’s movable panels form geometric shapes, a method inspired by Iranian-American artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and her series “Convertibles.”
Nassar calls the landscapes “versions of Palestine as they exist in the minds of the diaspora.” Stories shape them, rather than direct experience alone. “They are the Palestine I heard stories about growing up, half made of imagination.” He describes them as “dreamlands and utopias that are colourful and fantastical – beautiful and romantic, but bittersweet.”
Heritage claimed, heritage damaged
Nassar’s hand-cut glass mosaics depict an orange tree, a lion, a man and patterns from the original Jabalia church. Local archaeologists in Gaza say Israeli shelling damaged the church. Nassar said: “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.” The work draws on fragments whose survival remains uncertain.
His interest in Byzantine mosaics began after he saw two panels at Ben Gurion International Airport, taken from a church in what is now northern Israel. That encounter led him to examine how archaeology and antiquities get used “not only for propaganda, but for land grabbing,” he said.
Nassar also pointed to the Roman and Byzantine ruins of Sabastia near Nablus. Israel recently announced it would expropriate the site and develop it as a tourism hub. “Israel is claiming that they’re preserving a historical site,” he said. “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.” Preservation is the official claim. Restricted access and further land seizure are the consequences Nassar describes.
Belonging without a template
Nassar was born in Manhattan and is of Palestinian and Polish heritage. His paternal grandfather migrated to the United States in the 1910s, helped establish the Arab American community in Yonkers and later sponsored the arrival of hundreds of families displaced by the Nakba. The family put being American first. His grandfather opened a cafe selling hamburgers and milkshakes and didn’t teach his children Arabic. “They were never taught Arabic because in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, the mindset was: we’re American now, so we speak English,” Nassar said.
That inheritance leaves Nassar negotiating belonging rather than presenting it as a credential. He said he can feel “not feeling Palestinian enough because I’m ‘only half’, and I grew up in New York.” He doesn’t speak Arabic fluently and natively, and family recipes differ from those in Palestine because they changed across generations. “My work is very American,” he said. “It’s like: I’m gonna do it, do something that’s my culture, but also do it my way and that’s individual.”
Nassar hopes the recreated mosaics can exist outside politicized contexts, “as something for themselves for their own sake.” He isn’t trying to imitate something that looks 2,000 years old or reproduce every colour exactly. His stated aim is human connection, not informational work about Palestine. The panels can’t remove the occupation from the route or restore a damaged church. They carry memory, craft and uncertainty into a room where viewers can meet them on their own terms.