Through casts of her own body, mycelium, resin, reflective surfaces, and sound recordings made from within the body itself, Nour Mobarak explores creation, reproduction, material transformation, and the relationship between biology and technology.
At the Whitney Biennial 2026, Nour Mobarak presents a body of work that is at once intimate, physical, and deeply conceptual.
Born in Cairo and working between Athens and Washington State, Mobarak creates sculptures using casts of her own body, combining materials such as resin with mycelium, the root-like network of fungi.
Across these works, the body becomes more than a subject. It becomes a material, a structure, an instrument, and a site through which ideas about reproduction, transformation, perception, and creation can unfold.
The Body as Material
Mobarak’s use of her own body immediately creates an intimate relationship between artist and object.
Rather than representing the body from a distance, she works directly from its physical form.
Casting transforms the body into an object while preserving traces of its shape and presence.
The resulting sculptures occupy an ambiguous position between self-portrait, abstraction, biological form, and constructed object.
Rectoverso
In works such as Rectoverso, the body is reduced and transformed into form.
Rather than functioning as a conventional figurative sculpture, it becomes a surface through which Mobarak explores light, color, material, and space.
The recognizable human body begins to move toward abstraction.
This transformation allows the sculpture to operate simultaneously as something intensely personal and something less fixed—a form capable of changing according to its material, surroundings, and the viewer’s position.
Mycelium and Living Systems
Mobarak’s incorporation of mycelium adds another biological dimension to the work.
Mycelium is the branching, root-like structure through which fungi grow and interact with their environments.
By bringing it together with resin and casts of the human body, Mobarak creates an encounter between different material systems.
The organic and manufactured coexist.
The human body intersects with fungal structures.
Creation becomes something that happens through multiple forms of life and material transformation rather than through the human body alone.
Reproductive Logistics 4
Questions surrounding reproduction become particularly visible in Reproductive Logistics 4.
The work incorporates a cast of Mobarak’s pregnant body, transforming an intensely physical experience into a sculptural structure.
Its reflective surface mirrors and distorts the environment around it.
As viewers approach, their own bodies and the surrounding gallery become incorporated into the sculpture’s surface.
The work therefore refuses to remain isolated.
Instead, the pregnant body, the viewer, and the museum environment become visually entangled.
Reflection and the Viewer
The reflective quality of the sculpture introduces another important relationship.
You are not simply looking at Mobarak’s body.
You also encounter your own.
Your reflection enters the work, changes as you move, and becomes distorted by its surface.
That interaction complicates the traditional separation between artwork and audience.
The body represented by the sculpture and the body observing it temporarily occupy the same visual field.
Broadcasts
Alongside the sculptures, Mobarak’s sound piece Broadcasts moves the exploration of the body from its exterior form to its internal sounds.
The work layers recordings captured from within her own body, bringing together personal, medical, and everyday sounds.
These recordings transform normally inaccessible bodily processes into an immersive sonic environment.
The body becomes both the source of the work and an instrument producing it.
What is ordinarily internal and private is broadcast outward into shared space.
Biology, Technology, and Creation
Together, these works complicate distinctions between natural and artificial, interior and exterior, individual and environment.
Casting technologies preserve the body’s form.
Reflective surfaces incorporate the viewer.
Recording technologies reveal internal sounds.
Mycelium introduces another living system into the material language of sculpture.
Rather than treating biology and technology as opposites, Mobarak allows them to converge.
Nour Mobarak at the Whitney Biennial 2026
Within the Whitney Museum of American Art, Mobarak’s work expands the body beyond traditional representation.
The body becomes simultaneously physical and conceptual: something capable of generating images, sounds, materials, and new relationships with the surrounding environment.
Her use of pregnancy further intensifies these questions by placing reproduction and creation in direct conversation with artistic production.
At the Whitney Biennial 2026, Nour Mobarak’s work becomes a meditation on creation itself—bringing biology, technology, reproduction, sound, and lived experience together while positioning the body as both subject and instrument.
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