Adrian Pepe: A Shroud is a Cloth

Renowned fiber artist Adrian Pepe presents A Shroud is a Cloth, an evocative exploration of memory, healing, and the delicate interplay between destruction and renewal. Opening on January 29 at NIKA Project Space in Dubai, this multidisciplinary showcase challenges the rigid demarcations between art, labor, nature, and performance through a textile medium. 

At the heart of the exhibition lies a monumental 200-square-meter woolen textile that once wrapped a damaged heritage building in the center of Beirut. Through A Shroud is a Cloth, Pepe explores ideas of fragmentation, repair, and the traces left by personal and collective histories. The works, derived from a single common source, range in scale from intimate to monumental. Wool—cleansed, processed, manipulated, and recontextualized—becomes a vessel for gestures, images, and rituals. Debris extracted from the wool—such as dirt, seed diaspores, and remnants of vegetable matter—is preserved, capturing the landscape within the material. Stitching, felting, and acts of assembly transform these materials into new compositions, reflecting on material processes, ecological intimacy, and the fragility of being. Through forms evocative of votives, maps, and effigies, these works gesture toward the intangible—engaging questions of memory, identity, and connection. 

“Wool has this capacity to hold time—it is resilient yet malleable, intimate yet expansive,” says 
Pepe. “In this exhibition, I am exploring how materials are never neutral; they shape, and are shaped by care, labor, and the environments they inhabit.” 

The Lebanon-based Honduran artist’s practice explores the intersections of materials and meaning, presenting a poetic dialogue on transformation. Over the years, NIKA Project Space and Adrian Pepe have collaborated on multiple projects, demonstrating a shared commitment to innovation and artistic exploration. For the 2023 edition of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, NIKA Project Space supported Pepe’s Utility of Being: A Paradox of Proximity, a site-specific installation staged at the city’s old slaughterhouse. The installation was conceived from the gathered pelts of Awassi sheep, a byproduct of the slaughtering process, and offered a thought-provoking engagement with material reuse and cultural context. 

In 2024, Pepe presented Entangled Matters 2.0 in Beirut, a public installation and exhibition that enveloped the façade of the Villa des Palmes—a building affected by the port explosion—in hand felted wool textiles produced in Lebanon. This project was part of UNESCO’s BERYT (The Beirut Housing Rehabilitation and Cultural and Creative Industries Recovery) initiative, which called on cultural practitioners affected by the blast to submit proposals for developing cultural productions in impacted neighborhoods.