Jordan Nassar's embroidered Palestine doesn't exist on any map. The New York artist says so plainly. His landscapes, now on view at No 9 Cork Street in London, are “versions of Palestine as they exist in the minds of the diaspora.” They're “half made of imagination,” he said, “dreamlands and utopias that are colourful and fantastical – beautiful and romantic, but bittersweet.”
It's his first exhibition in the UK in a decade, presented by Dubai gallery The Third Line. The show pairs tatreez panels, Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery set into imagined landscapes, with hand-cut glass mosaics inspired by the Byzantine church in Jabalia, Gaza.
An Artist Who Rejects the Propaganda Label
Born in Manhattan to a Palestinian and Polish heritage, Nassar is cautious about turning art into a political instrument. “I'm not trying to make informational work about Palestine because that's not what art is for me,” he said. He added: “I am very opinionated about activism and art. I don't really know if art is the best venue for these things. For me, it's more about human connection.”
That restraint carries weight in a field where cultural output about Palestine often faces an expectation to double as a statement. Nassar says he wants to make universal work that expresses daily life rather than instructing its audience. He hopes people with a diaspora experience will feel a connection, no matter where their families came from.
His own story is an immigrant's story. His paternal grandfather migrated to the United States in the 1910s, before the Nakba, 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.
Nassar describes not feeling “Palestinian enough because I'm 'only half', and I grew up in New York.” He doesn't speak Arabic fluently, and family recipes drifted from those in Palestine over generations. “My work is very American,” he said.
A Supply Chain That Runs Through Israel
The production details tell their own story. Nassar designs the panels and commissions craftswomen in the West Bank to embroider them. He buys specific fabric and ships it to a workshop in Ramallah. A friend collects the finished embroidery and drives it from the West Bank to Tel Aviv and then Jaffa. From there, a friend in Jaffa mails the fabric to the United States.
“She's just breaking it up into boxes and sending it in Israel Post, and it honestly comes so fast,” he said. “That's way faster than trying to ship it from Palestine.”
Nassar blames delays on Israel's occupation, and says he plans for work to take longer and avoids tight deadlines. Yet by his account, Palestinian craftwork reaches the world fastest by way of Israeli roads, Israeli cities and Israel's postal service. It's a small, practical illustration of how intertwined the two societies remain, even as politics pulls them apart.
Heritage, Archaeology and Contested Claims
The mosaics make the sharper argument. They 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 was careful about what he knows: “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.”
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 led, he said, to an investigation into “the use of archaeology and antiquities, not only for propaganda, but for land grabbing.”
He pointed to the Roman and Byzantine ruins of Sabastia near Nablus, which Israel recently announced it would expropriate and develop 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.” The article gives no Israeli official response to that characterization.
Nassar takes a deliberately loose approach to recreating the works. “I'm not trying to mimic something that looks 2,000 years old,” he said. “I'm also not trying to match every single colour and try to be perfect. I'm definitely taking liberties.” He hopes the pieces can exist “outside of being used as propaganda.”
The 2026 work “They Build Homes with Clouds” sets green, red and purple mountains against an ochre sky and sea. Nassar embroidered it on canvas and surrounded it with four smaller panels bearing colourful square patterns. The movable panels form geometric shapes, a method inspired by Iranian-American artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and her series “Convertibles.”
Why This Matters: Nassar's work arrives at a moment when cultural heritage has become another front in the dispute over Israel and the Palestinians. His comments hold two truths at once. Palestinian artists and craftswomen have found ways to keep working and reach global audiences, partly through practical cooperation that crosses the political divide. Claims about antiquities, from Gaza's churches to Sabastia, remain contested, with real consequences for land and access. His insistence that art shouldn't be reduced to propaganda is a standard worth applying to every side, including governments and institutions that treat heritage as a political asset.