Rawan Abbas

Rawan Abbas is an Egyptian artist, born in 1996, who lives and works in Cairo. Her work is made mostly from fabric. She embroiders, crochets and manipulates cloth to make textile pieces, sculpture and installations, and has also worked with video.

Abbas has no formal training in textile art. She picked up embroidery and crochet from maternal figures in her life and from women online. Her cloth is sourced locally, inherited or found on her travels, and she also gathers leftover scraps from dressmakers and seamstresses. Her subjects include womanhood, spiritualism, folklore and the history of ancient Egypt, read through personal stories. In the ongoing series Daughters of Infinite Women, she turns to body hair to set private desire against social rules.

She took a BA in Applied Arts at Helwan University in 2020, which included a year of Fine Art at Cardiff Metropolitan University on an Erasmus+ grant. She took part in Dak'Art in Dakar in 2022. Mashrabia Gallery showed her work at 1-54 in London in 2021 and at Abu Dhabi Art in 2023. In 2023, the year of her Hamburg residencies, she held two solo shows in the city, Replace at Galerie Genscher and My Words for Yours at Westwerk. A Cairo solo show, The Thread That Binds Us, followed in 2024.