Nadine Ghandour

Nadine Ghandour is an artist whose practice alternates between drawing, writing and sculpture. She holds an MFA from Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Nadine’s work presents stories of unstable architecture, shapeshifting surroundings, and buildings that trap their inhabitants. She is interested in ways we experience architecture within cities that develop at hyper speeds, and how this affects the psyche of their residents. She creates fictional characters, imagines spaces with bizarre lighting conditions, and immerses herself in absurd realities. Adjacent to her practice, she works in libraries and archives. She was Library and Research Manager at Jameel Library in Dubai, and archivist at PrintRoom Rotterdam.

In collaboration with Mona Ayyash, she also programmed the artist run initiative Office Run, a series of day-long takeovers of office spaces by artists and writers in Dubai from 2018-2019.

Nadine Ghandour’s research project YOU ARE HERE culminates in a library installation, performance and publication: 'YOU ARE HERE: An Essay on Libraries and Wayfinding.'

YOU ARE HERE is a meditation on wayfinding systems, reflecting on the psychological states of searching and the pursuit of extreme specificity. It focuses on references from the Rijksakademie Library collection, thinking through what answers a library built for artists has to offer on navigation. The chapters move through logics of mapping and categorisation at different scales within books, libraries, bodies, and cities.

The research began as an attempt to make an alternative wayfinding guide for the Rijksakademie library. In consulting the library collection and looking for what answers a collection made for artists had to offer, it was clear the material didn’t necessarily provide clarity or clues for efficiency, and at times promoted indecision and distraction. The research for the guide slowly turned into a compilation of excerpts from across the collection and then into a bibliographic essay on naming, searching, finding, and losing.