NIKA Project Space Dubai presents the first solo show in the United Arab Emirates by Münster-based Tatar artist Nazilya Nagimova, Follow the Snail.
The exhibition brings together new works created specifically for her solo project at NIKA Project Space alongside selected works from earlier projects. Despite originating from different periods, these works are united by a shared thematic core: the artist’s ongoing experiments with felt as a medium, her engagement with long histories of Tatar mobility and settlement, and the idea of home as a mobile, vulnerable, and constantly transforming structure.
Working with felt, a traditional material of her ancestors and a technique passed down through generations of her family, Nagimova explores memory, migration, and the search for belonging. For the artist, the notion of home also encompasses something that can be re-invented in a new place. Something constructed through memory, rituals, and the ability to carry and preserve lived experience. The exhibition unfolds as a reflection on the fragility of shelter and on how personal and collective memory shape our intimate relation to place and community.
Central to the project are the installation Jort (2025) and the video Chulpan – the Mother (2022), first presented at documenta fifteen in Kassel. The word jort derives from the Tatar verb yörtü (to carry), recalling the yurt as a portable dwelling. Although Tatar homes are no longer mobile or made of wool, they retain the same name, carrying within it a layered history of transformation.
The spiral form of Jort, echoing the image of a snail, becomes a recurring principle in Nagimova!s practice— symbolizing movement, cyclicality, and continuity without rupture. In Chulpan – the Mother, felt exposed to natural elements gradually reveals its inner structure, evoking the maternal body as both protective and vulnerable. The video incorporates texts written in Iske Imla, an obsolete Turkic-Tatar script, marking a rupture in cultural and historical continuity.
The exhibition also includes Jort III (2025), a black “house” reflecting a later stage in the artist!s reflection on home amid displacement, loss, and polarization. Together, the white and black jorts form two poles, questioning what makes a home a site of protection or, conversely, of erosion.
Across the exhibition, felt functions as a metaphor for transformation — materially and spiritually. In works such as Where the Voices End, architectural references drawn from Islamic traditions frame prayer as an inward process of attention and orientation, where perception turns inward and voice becomes unnecessary.
Through this constellation of works, the artist constructs a system of visual and material correspondences in which corporeality, time, and cultural continuity are deeply intertwined. Felt becomes a key material for negotiating a transition from manual, tactile labor toward spiritual practices, the search for inner identity, and reflections on transformed modes of communication within present-day social realities.
Press release from NIKA Project Space
Image: Nazilya Nagimova. Follow the Snail. 2025. Detail. Felt. Image courtesy of the artist
