Nada Baraka’s practice encompasses painting and installation, unfolding as an immediate, visceral response to external stimuli. In her work, she creates surreal environments shaped by absurdity and psychic transformation.
Drawing from an eclectic visual language – ranging from 1960s and 70s design and animation, to cartoonish depictions of violence – she conjures charged, dreamlike scenes that verge on the inappropriate and the bizarre.
Her earlier explorations of fleshy bodily forms have since evolved into expansive spatial compositions, where the physical body is refracted and dispersed within her landscapes. Baraka’s process is haptic and situational. Harsh strokes collide with soft gestures, and phantasmic forms emerge through an assemblage of collected visual imagery. The body in her work morphs and reacts to its surrounding environment with emotional and psychic force.
Baraka’s recent work takes on a more contextual turn, where she responds to the personal archive of her late grandfather, Egypt’s former Minister of Irrigation. Through site-specific installations, she explores the materiality of archives and the spaces they occupy, questioning how memory and history are embedded in, and shaped by physical objects and environments.
Baraka’s work drifts between the fantastical and the corporeal, the psychological and the sensory. Seeking to articulate a situation rather than a fixed form, her paintings give presence to experiences that are fleeting, felt, or repressed.
