Scholar ｜Nour Elbery: Breathing Within Order

As the first Liu Shiming Scholar at NYU Abu Dhabi, Nour Elbery is currently pursuing her MFA in Art and Media. Born in Egypt and trained as an architect, Elbery is an artist and curator based in Dubai whose practice moves fluidly between installation, sculpture, and performance Her work examines how space shapes the body, how systems translate emotion, and how human desire  is conditioned by spatial logics.

Nour Elbery often describes her work as a conversation with the minor forces of everyday life: 

“My day unfolds in a sustained mode of inquiry.” she tells us. Her daily rhythm moves between classes, studio, and ordinary interruptions — the faucet that won’t shut off, the sensor that won’t register her presence. “These frictions are not anecdotes,” she says. “They’re cues.”

Back in the studio, these cues are arranged into a shifting network of fragments: images, sentences, receipts, and found objects placed beside one another like parts of an unfinished score. “The studio becomes a rehearsal space,” she says, “where pacing matters, how one fragment makes another hesitate, how a margin slows an image, how an object reroutes attention.” She calls this process “a choreography of adjacency”, a system of arrangement where rhythm matters more than resolution.

Nour Elbery installing Permeable Transactions (2025) at NYU Abu Dhabi.

Nour’s works respond to these observations with a language that is both formal and affective.In her installation Permeable Transactions (2025), she constructs an administrative stage: a small kiosk where visitors line up, approach the counter, speak a single word, and receive a priced receipt in return. The scene repeats for hours — the sounds of printing, waiting, and soft exchange forming a steady rhythm of compliance.

Nour Elbery. Permeable Transactions (2025). MFA Midreview Show at NYUAD. Courtesy of the artist.

The work references Cairo’s growing toll-gate economy, yet it does not depict the city; it reenacts its logic at the scale of the body. The audience becomes part of the algorithm: their waiting is timed, their interaction codified, their longing archived. As Nour writes, “What circulates is not fulfillment of desire but compliance; the artifact is a slip of paper that registers longing as account.”

Her 2024 installation and performance Breaking Bread, inspired by Egypt’s 1977 Bread Riots, transforms a dinner table into a scene between ritual and regulation. Cast loaves of buttered bread sit beneath the lights, softening slowly as the performer repeats gestures of tearing and spreading. The table glistens, melts, exhales. The air thickens with scent.

Nour Elbery. Breaking Bread (2024). Courtesy of the artist.

The work blurs the boundary between sustenance and control, turning food into an interface of touch and power. In Nour’s hands, the act of eating becomes a study in social choreography, a meditation on how intimacy and governance overlap.

Nour’s understanding of art finds an unexpected echo in the spirit of Liu Shiming.“Liu Shiming’s sculptures attend to ordinary gestures without spectacle, the figure is met where it lives,” she says. “My work turns that ethic outward, to the infrastructures that choreograph those same lives, and asks how proximity, permission, and attention are distributed.”

Nour Elbery. Call Pest Control (2025). MFA Midreview Show at NYUAD. Courtesy of the artist.

That methodological kinship bridges their worlds across time: Liu shaped clay into the presence of everyday humanity; Nour maps the invisible systems that organize contemporary life.Both artists, in their own mediums, insist on keeping process visible, on showing how value, care, and dignity are made legible.

“Art is not about arriving at fixed answers,” Nour tells us. “It’s about keeping adjacency alive, allowing things to keep affecting one another.”

In her installations, a light’s delay, the breath of a performer, the fading heat of thermal paper…all become part of a quiet resistance. They don’t announce themselves loudly;They simply remind us that even within structure, there is still a rhythm that belongs to us.

---

Interviewed by: Chirui Cheng

Written by: Chirui Cheng