Rawan Abbas (b.1996, Egypt) is a multidisciplinary artist working across textile, sculpture, and installation. Employing traditional and experimental approaches to textile art and fabric manipulation, Abbas’ practice is material driven. She draws on spiritualism, ancient Egyptian history, personal narratives, womanhood, and folklore to craft new worlds and storytell. The objects she constructs are rich with visual references gathered from personal observation and research.
Abbas works with materials that have been locally sourced, inherited, or collected during her travels. In an effort to be sustainable, she collects fabric scraps from dressmakers and seamstresses, therefore making her community unintentional participants in the making of her work. She believes that fabrics carry an intimacy within them; they recall emotions, make statements, and embody history. With no formal training in the discipline of textile arts, Abbas relies on community elders to develop her craft. By learning to embroider and crochet from the maternal figures in her life, as well as women online, she has cultivated a unique visual language that’s both deeply personal and global.
She’s particularly interested in how personal narratives intersect and overlap across cultures and time, allowing for infinite instances of establishing connections. Her ongoing project, Daughters of Infinite Women, explores bodily autonomy and desires, juxtaposed against social constraints and cultural practices. With a focus on body hair and its connotations, her artworks propose a new lens through which individual desires can be manifested and play on the emotional response hair elicits in the viewer.
Abbas has participated in the Dak’art Biennial (2022), Dakar, Senegal; 1-54 Art Fair (2021), London, UK; and Abu Dhabi Art Fair (2023), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Solo exhibitions include The Thread that Binds Us, at ARD Art Institution, Cairo, Egypt (2024); My Words for Yours, Westwerk, Hamburg, Germany; and Replace, Galerie Genscher, Hamburg, Germany (2023). She has taken part in residencies such as Achterhaus Ateliergemeinschaft e.V., Westwerk’s International Artist Residency in Hamburg, Germany; Emptyroom.art’s Nature Residency; and Rele Arts Foundation’s Bootcamp (2022) for Emerging Artists.
Abbas lives and works in Cairo, Egypt.