"The Window That Watched the Spiral Pose as a Staircase" explores how architectural elements witness, influence, and structure human experience. In this work, Alwan makes a shift in her use of her grandfather’s patterns, interpreting and recomposing them to tell her own personal stories. The work takes the form of an abstracted window derived from a real window positioned along a spiral staircase in the artist’s home. Located between the upstairs and downstairs levels, which are two distinct psychological territories for the artist, the window becomes an active observer of the oscillations between these states of being. Each floor holds a different version of selfhood, and moving between them feels like accessing different internal conditions for the artist. The spiral, understood here in colloquial terms as a form of psychological unraveling, coexists with the daily labor of performing normalcy embedded in this movement between floors.

The work emerges from a larger body of pieces developed through a long-term engagement with inherited drawings from the artist’s grandfather and a desire to continue a family inheritance. The embroidered textiles that function as the window’s glass panels extend this lineage of intergenerational transmission. The artist spent years working with her grandfather’s drawings, the patterns existed as meditative gestures of repetition but there were no explicit meanings behind them. Through this process, she began to interpret the patterns as forms capable of carrying meaning and to use them in different compositions to tell her own stories. Within these drawings, fish peculiarly appeared as the only animate forms shaped by her grandfather's religious beliefs that restricted drawing primarily to inanimate objects. For the artist, the fish became a symbol of the lived condition, referencing inner states and emotional movement.

Through reworking hundreds of these inherited patterns, the artist transforms repetitive familial motifs into an inherited yet personal visual language. Each embroidered panel becomes a vignette that tells a personal narrative situated within the window as both an apparatus and an observer of these lived experiences. The work combines this inherited visual language with architectural elements that observe and structure movement, emotion, growth, and spirals to tell a story through inheritance and space.

Silk organza, wire

Various sizes

Photos a la chair is a public art project born from a collaboration between Ali Karimi and Camille Zakariya in Bahrain featuring different local artists, designers, and different locations across Bahrain. Each version is held to highlight a different location in which an artist creates an art piece as a backdrop, a designer provides a chair, and the meet up is open to the public to come and get their photos professionally taken by Camille for one day. In its 21st version, Noor Alwan was the featured artist, and the location of choice was a beautiful abandoned building at the heart of Manama that was once the family home of the Kazerooni family and then turned into a storage space for the spices sold at the souq. The artwork featured colorful textiles draped to contrast and highlight the aging structure and revive the building as a communal space to host people from all walks of life for one memorable afternoon.

‘BEYOND THE THREAD’  EXHIBITION, 2024

Organza fabric, cotton threads, steel rings, metal connectors

170 cm x 200cm

"Sacred Sanctum" is part of the artist’s ongoing "Sacred Spaces" series, which adapts her grandfather Mohamed Janahi’s drawings into spatial installations using embroidery on textiles collectively embroidered by the family. Inspired by a dome in one of Janahi’s mosque sketches, the work reimagines this architectural form as a serene suspended human-scale environment made from coloured sheer organza and embroidery.

The work investigates how the accumulated care of collective making can become spatially felt. The textiles were developed through rituals of embroidery sessions with the family, shaped by conversations, affection, grief and remembrance. The act of making through mourning and remembrance created something new, collective, and inhabitable. The work retains these traces in the fabric itself. Visitors enter beneath the suspended dome and are engulfed within a space through which the time, touch, and labour of many hands become an atmosphere that can be inhabited and felt. "Sacred Sanctum" approaches spirituality as a possibility that emerges through this encounter. The inherited sketch becomes a temporary interior in which collective care, translucent material, and bodily presence come together to create a fragile space of serenity and reflection.

Commissioned for Sharjah Islamic Art Festival 2023

Organza fabric, cotton threads, steel rings, metal connectors, LED lights

400 cm x 280 cm

"Sacred Orbits" is an interactive installation that continues the artist’s ongoing exploration of reworlding, taking elements from memory, culture, and personal history and reimagining them as new spatial and emotional experiences. In this iteration, Alwan imagines a posthumous collaboration with her late grandfather by re-envisioning a memory of him handcrafting his favourite toy, the spinning top, or "dawama", as a larger interactive environment.

Her grandfather would carve spinning tops from wood, embellish them with pen, and watch them spin endlessly on metal trays. This memory invited Alwan to think about the spiritual resonance of circular movement, and how spirituality can exist alongside playfulness, humour, and openness. The work considers how a playful act can open into contemplation, and how ordinary movement can carry a sense of spiritual wonder.

"Sacred Orbits" continues adapting Janahi’s drawings into embroidery on sheer fabric collectively embroidered by the family, while introducing an interplay between circular movement, light, and shadow. The installation consists of a cylindrical core of embroidered sheer fabric lit from within, enclosed by an outer layer of blank white fabric onto which the embroidery’s shadows are cast.

Visitors are invited to activate a lever that sets the embroidered fabric in motion, animating the shadows across the surrounding surface. As the cylinder turns, the work creates an ethereal environment in which the embroidered patterns revolve. Through this interaction, "Sacred Orbits" transforms a private memory into a shared spatial encounter, where play and spirituality are experienced as overlapping ways of being in the world.

Photo Credits - Moonlight Media

Organza fabric, cotton threads, steel rings, steel connectors

250 cm x 80cm x 80cm

"Sacred Resonance" is part of an ongoing series that the artist started in 2021 that adapts her grandfather Mohamed Janahi's drawings into spatial installations using embroidery on textiles collectively embroidered by the family. The artist continued exploring and researching her grandfather’s practice after his passing, driven by a yearning to learn more about him.

Going through the drawings and objects he left behind, she found sketches of mosques that were never built. With Alwan's own background in architecture, the natural progression for the project was to create her own take on these spaces that could have been. She approaches this process as a posthumous collaboration with her grandfather where his two-dimensional sketches provide the initial language for the work, while her interpretations bring them into a new spatial existence. In doing so, she approaches inheritance as a form of transformation and response.

She is drawn to this tension between being and non-being, and the exploration of presence within absence. Similarly, creating these spaces in her installations channels the same paradox of manifesting a memory of something that has never been, and attempting to realise an unfulfilled wish for a loved one. In this iteration, "Sacred Resonance" is inspired by a minaret in one of her grandfather's earliest sketches of a mosque. The minaret is approached as an architectural gesture that sonically calls people toward a sacred space beyond it. In this sense, Janahi’s sketch becomes a call towards a space that never came into being. Reinterpreted at human scale through different coloured sheer organza and embroidery, "Sacred Resonance" gives physical form to the call of a sacred space that was never built.

Recipient of the Misk Grant 2021

Organza fabric, cotton thread, aluminum rods (collection of 7)

100 x 150cm (each piece)

Collection of Misk Art Institute, Riyadh

Sacred Spaces is an installation consisting of suspended sheer fabrics embroidered with layered patterns derived from the artist's grandfather's drawings (Mohammed Janahi). Alwan grew up watching her grandfather ritually draw hundreds of patterns for hours, a practice rooted in serenity, contemplation, repetition, and immersion. Sacred Spaces adapts these drawings from paper into a spatial installation, while developing a distinctive embroidery language inspired by the organic movement of his ballpoint pen lines.

The patterns often draw inspiration from vernacular architecture, while others emerged through the artist's grandfather's own visual language, informed by his background as a builder. Through decades of repetitive drawing, the practice evolved into a meditative process through which he immersed himself in making. Witnessing this throughout her childhood, Alwan became intrigued by the drawings and the contemplative process from which they emerged, and chose embroidery as a medium for its similarly repetitive and immersive nature.

What began as the artist's introspective experiment developed into a shared family ritual that fostered conversation, storytelling, remembrance, and bonding while sewing together after Friday lunches. Through the collective act of making, the drawings were continually reinterpreted, allowing the inherited visual language to create a space for slowing down, conversation, and connection, through which different forms of togetherness gradually emerged.

Through the translation of drawing into textile and textile into space, Sacred Spaces creates an inhabitable environment that extends a family's intimate culture of making into the public realm, inviting visitors to inhabit a practice that was once private and experience it as a shared spatial encounter.

Commissioned by 1971 Design Space, the two installations were conceived to celebrate the 50th Emirati national day in collaboration with Abdulla Buhijji.

“The tree of the Union is bearing more fruit, its roots are extending, and its goodness is overflowing; and this tree shall so remain for all future generations.”

Inspired by the above quote from the Founding Father Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the proposed installations depict the notions of “unity and growth”, both installations speak to each other, while one installation represents unity, the other installation shows flourishment and growth as a result of unity.

Reflective stainless steel, 3 x 3.2m

2021

Collaboration with Abdulla Buhijji

This art piece is part of a pop up art exhibition (Mawall) at the Bahrain International Airport. It is inspired by a song sung by women on the shore to bid the men going to the sea farewell. Its been said that the title of the song calls out for the sea to repent. Women, back in the day, gathered palm tree leaves and wood and used it to start a fire prior to singing the song. This song represents the strength and defensive demeanor that women put on as a means of threatening and scaring the sea with fire, to ensure the safe return of their men. This installation depicts this song by gathering palm tree leaves in a sculptural manner, painted with a gradient of red to represent the burning leaves and to depict a moment of time within this song.

This art piece is part of a pop up art exhibition (Mawall) at Bahrain International Airport. It represents a song that speaks about the countdown to the bride's day to join her husband's house. The song is represented by the projection of thirty traditional Bahraini percussion instrument Tara with the moon cycle painted upon them. The art installation whimsically represents the song by combining the moon cycle, which is the traditional means of measuring time and days, superimposed on the celebratory Tara.

Muharraq, 2021

Collaboration with Abdulla Buhijji

What(a)rainbow is an art piece that is part of a pop up art exhibition (Mawall) at Bahrain International Airport. It symbolises the traditional rituals that celebrate new brides in the "jelwa" celebrations. Inspired by Whatrainbow, a traditional Bahraini song that is sung in Jelwas, this art piece tells a story of the origins of the song. Whatrainbow a colloquial bahraini term symbolises a song that is sung while women in the traditional Jelwa wave pieces of colourful cloth upon the bride's head representative of the colours eventually merging into white. The origins of the term comes from a segment of a foreign song that goes "White rainbow while you and me". This is a great depiction of Bahrain's heritage being a melting pot of different layers of culture woven together. The art piece is depicted by different acrylic pieces of different colours placed upon each other with traditional embellishment found on the Jelwa garment Jalabeya engraved on them.

Muharraq, 2021

For anyone who ever lost a home, everyone who is saddened to see a city emptied of its inhabitants, and everyone grieving for a beautiful forgotten abandoned part of a city racing towards development. The piece is an attempt to convey the essence of the place; the fact that the space is what people make of it, a canvas to their memories old and new. In this many of us seek consolation, it gives us hope that a space will forgive us, and will allow us to make it ours again.

The concept was to bring in a group of people to an abandoned building and managing them in leaving a livening mark on it, using paint and performers symbolically. The piece, in that sense, was the artist’s attempt to re-inject life the dead space, while highlighting the juxtaposition of colors, materials, function of space, and the demographics of users/inhibitors.

Muharraq, 2017

Third place winner in the Bahrain 45th Annual Art Fair 2019

“In-retrospect” is a context generated installation that depicts the juxtaposition between memories and physical space. Yearning for her childhood, the artist revisited her old family house in Manama after relocating 15 years ago. The nostalgia brought back imagery of football tournaments on the streets, the mischievous runs to the “coldstore” to eat ice-cream on Fridays and the afternoon strolls with the neighbours kids. These memories were created on the main street in front of the building; this was a clear depiction of the fluid boundary between private and public spaces. With the increasing development of housing and cities around notions of privacy, the feel of community and social spaces are diminishing. “In-retrospect” is a manifestation of the stories that were generated in and around the house, in a form of clouds of memories that spill out of the building to show the inhabitation of previous generations as another layer on the existing physical space.

Manama, 2019

Collaboration with Muneera Al Awadhi

In areas that are appealing for commercial investments, green spaces get destroyed in favor for money-making developments; a default accepted practice as the greenery does not hold return value. Block 338 in Adliya Bahrain became a booming young commercial district in Manama after being a seaside green residential village. The district demolished its last green farm to provide a parking lot for the growing number of visitors. A protest is vision of trees aligned with torches in protest of being neglected and forgotten.

Twenty-one poles varying in heights arranged in a grid with 0.7m intervals. Poles are topped by unified light fixtures, creating an array of lights on four different levels. The installation is placed on the edge of the parking lot in small leftover of the farm it replaced, places in an enclosure of existing trees and palm trees. The installation also aims to be draw attention to potential public spaces, activate an abandoned location and create a public space in an urban congested area.

Adliya, 2017

Collaboration with Muneera Al Awadhi

Mass Appeal is a marketing tool that strips down the product of features to make it basic enough to be appealing for the maximum number of people, in complete disregard to their demographics and interests. Mass appeal is the opposite of targeted marketing and it helped selling products to bigger audiences in Mass Media age. The concept behind this installation is to argue that nowadays, in Social Media age, the Mass-Appeal tool is being applied to people by their own selves, stripping themselves from individuality pleading for mass appeal.

A sculpture of a metal pipe bent in continuity to form seat and an overhang. The seating arrangement is divided to two groups; a cluster of four seat and one seat that sites alone. The four seat that are arranged in a close a proximity and are in different levels overseeing each other. A corresponding light design completes the installation with having one faded warm white light shining on the each of the four seats eyelevel, and a rainbow colored light shine on the individual seat.

Materials: Metal pipes, metal elbows, steel coated wood, light fixtures, and colored film.

Size: 2.7m x 2.2m. Height: 2m.

Exhibited at The Nest Festival 2018

Adliya, 2018

As the Bahraini culture became less dependent on walking as a means of transport the less we started accounting for walkability in our cities, and the more we started forgetting the vernacular processes that shaped our city. The Bahraini neighborhood was shaped in response to the social and environmental needs. The less we understand this, the less culturally and environmentally relevant our cities became. The aim of this project was to engage youth to experience the urban fabric of the old city of Muharraq, to make the city more relatable and to revive and preserve the vernacular solutions.

A route was selected to cover the major elements of traditional Bahraini urban-fabric. To increase interaction between participants and the space, a series of installations were placed in each stop. Installations allowed participants to engage with the space enough to understand its dimensions, materials, environmental and social qualities. The experimental project successfully engaged the participants as well as residents of the area. The elements selected to be highlighted from the traditional Bahraini urban fabric included: Baraha, Daoos, Souq, and Amara

Muharraq, 2019

Absence is a project executed as part of the Ofoq Public Art Residency in Egypt. Absence is an installment that is part of the artist’s series of works that explore the relationship between the people/space, the seen/unseen, and the tangible/intangible. In “Absence”, the artist explores the imbalance in cities, as some areas around Cairo suffer from complete congestion, and in contrast, vast unused spaces are left to be. The art installation inhabits the skeletal structure of a building and serves as a reminder for passers by to imagine an alternative use of existing spaces, while expressing the dynamic relationship between space and time.

Materials: fabric, acrylic paint 

Cairo, 2019

In collaboration with Shaun Baranyi, Brian Fiscus, John Jiang and Zack Nolen

As part of the Play Elements module under the guidance of Professor Julia Jamrozik at the University at Buffalo, the brief challenged the students to create playscapes that are engaging, temporary and portable. Three play elements were designed and executed, one that is passive, and engages users with their surrounding contexts. The other two instigate active play. A range of materials were used to execute the play elements: yarn, duct tape, plastic hoops, car tyres, cardboard, yoga balls and construction nets.

Buffalo, 2016

Based within a heavily collaborative society entails certain unspoken rules that society imposes and people subconsciously grow to abide by without questioning its validity.

“Regulatory Rules” is the title of an art work exhibited for “By the Book” exhibit in Birmingham, UK. “Regulatory Rules” is a play on existing road signs that we have grown accustomed to. It manipulates the signs graphically to highlight some of the spatial and social issues we encounter. It aims to provoke people to think critically about the information they receive from society everyday.

Birmingham, 2017