Adrian Pepe: A Shroud is a Cloth
"[Life] is attached to itself only by a hair—but by a hair of the other." —Jacques Derrida
There is a moment in Adrian Pepe’s work when wool ceases to be wool, when its fibers seem to exhale the breath of history, when the very act of weaving becomes an invocation of something more profound than material itself. It is in this space—between fiber and form, between memory and monument—that Pepe’s solo exhibition, A Shroud is a Cloth, unfolds at NIKA Project Space in Dubai.
The Honduras-born, Lebanon-based artist is not simply a maker of textiles; he is a weaver of narratives, a conjurer of gestures suspended in material. Wool, the ancestral medium of both protection and devotion, becomes a conduit for transformation—an object that bears the weight of labor, love, and loss. Through stitching, felting, and layering, Pepe renders cloth as a witness, a quiet but persistent keeper of time.
At the heart of the exhibition is a 200-square-meter woolen textile—an artifact of resilience. It once wrapped a scarred building in Beirut, a city where history is inscribed not only in books but in the very skin of its structures. When the port blast of August 4, 2020, ruptured the city’s fabric, it also unraveled stories, displacing people and dissolving entire narratives into dust. But wool, in its quiet, yielding way, held onto something. The felt that cloaked the wounded façade now carries the imprint of that place, of that moment, and in its recontextualization, it speaks to the endurance of human and material memory.
Pepe’s exploration of textiles extends beyond the act of making; it is about the entanglement of self, community, and environment. The exhibition presents wool not merely as a substance but as a vessel, absorbing gestures and histories, collecting remnants of the landscapes it has traversed—dirt, seeds, and vegetable matter—embedding within its fibers the remnants of a world in flux.
“A shroud is a cloth.” The title itself carries weight. A shroud is an enclosure, a shelter, a farewell, a second skin for the departed. But a shroud is also an act of care, a way to hold onto what is slipping away. In Pepe’s hands, the act of felting—compressing wool through labor, heat, and moisture—mirrors the rituals of healing, of drawing fragmented things back into wholeness. In the exhibition, body parts cast in wool and collagen stand as votive offerings—gestures of remembrance and repair. Inspired by ex-votos, the objects bridge the corporeal and the sacred, speaking to the ways we seek solace in materiality, in the things we touch and hold.
“Wool has this capacity to hold time—it is resilient yet malleable, intimate yet expansive,” Pepe reflects. And in its softness, there is resistance. Wool, a material of warmth and shelter, is also a laborious thing. To shear, clean, felt, and stitch is to engage in a process that requires patience, devotion, and repetition. The labor is not invisible here—it is embedded within every fold and fiber, within the rhythmic dance of hand and thread.
Pepe’s work exists in dialogue with the past, but it is not nostalgic. It is a reimagining, a questioning. What does it mean to care for materials? What do we carry with us, and what do we leave behind? How do we mend not only cloth but also collective wounds?
