In London, Jordan Nassar’s exhibition brings Palestinian embroidery and images of Gaza’s damaged Jabalia church into view alongside the occupation barriers shaping how he makes his work. The New York artist commissions craftswomen in the West Bank to embroider panels, but says delays tied to Israel’s occupation mean he must allow more time for production and avoid tight deadlines.
Embroidery across occupied territory
Nassar designs the panels and sends specific fabric to a workshop in Ramallah. Once the embroidery is finished, a friend collects it and drives it from the West Bank to Tel Aviv and then Jaffa; a friend in Jaffa mails the fabric to the United States. Nassar said that route is faster than trying to ship the work from Palestine. “She just breaks it up into boxes and sends it in Israel Post, and it honestly comes so fast,” he said. “That's way faster than trying to ship it from Palestine.”
The panels pair tatreez, Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery, with imagined landscapes shaped by diaspora memories and stories. Nassar described them as “versions of Palestine as they exist in the minds of the diaspora.” They are, he said, “the Palestine I heard stories about growing up, half made of imagination.” He called them “dreamlands and utopias that are colourful and fantastical – beautiful and romantic, but bittersweet.”
His 2026 work “They Build Homes with Clouds” sets green, red and purple mountains against an ochre sky and sea. Four smaller panels with colourful square patterns sit around it. Nassar’s movable panels form geometric shapes, a method inspired by Iranian-American artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and her “Convertibles” series.
Church mosaics and land
A second part of the exhibition presents hand-cut glass mosaics inspired by the Byzantine church in Jabalia, Gaza. The works show an orange tree, a lion, a man and patterns from the original church. Local archaeologists in Gaza say Israeli shelling damaged the building. 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.”
Nassar said his interest in Byzantine mosaics began when he saw two panels at Ben Gurion International Airport, taken from a church in what is now northern Israel. That encounter prompted him to examine “the use of archaeology and antiquities, not only for propaganda, but for land grabbing,” he said.
He 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,” Nassar 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.”
A family history shaped by displacement
Nassar’s paternal grandfather migrated to the United States in the 1910s, before the Nakba. He 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 said he sometimes feels “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 said family dishes differ from those in Palestine because recipes changed across generations. “My work is very American. It's like: I'm gonna do it, do something that's my culture, but also do it my way and that's individual,” he said.
His first UK exhibition in a decade is on view at No 9 Cork Street in London, presented by Dubai gallery The Third Line. Nassar said he hopes people with a diaspora experience will feel a connection, wherever their families came from. He wants to express daily life and human connection rather than make informational work about Palestine.