BIO
Nadia Coën is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City, born and raised in Zimbabwe, with generational ties to Egypt.
Coën’s experiential time-based practice explore the intersection of architecture, poetics, light, and ephemera. Housed under the umbrella name The Inclining Experiment, Coën has produced a large body of work: architectonic light installation environments, time-based /text-based projections, works on paper, artist books/printed matter and artifact assemblages.
Coën is a two-time MacDowell Colony resident and has exhibited at numerous venues such as The Drawing Center, White Columns, Exit Art, the Guggenheim Lab, and the Whitney Museum.
She was a resident at ArtEventura Residency in Andalusia, Spain in 2023, and returned the summer of 2024. She was recently awarded the Emily Harvey Foundation Residency in Venice, Italy for 2025.
Pioneering the 1980s East Village Art Movement, Coën co-founded two seminal artist-book collectives: YOUR HOUSE IS MINE and ANTI-UTOPIA. YOUR HOUSE IS MINE is a curated protest project with over 50 artists, responding to social unrest, homelessness, gentrification, and the AIDS epidemic of the 80s and 90s. It is held in collections including MoMA, The Whitney, Getty, Centre Pompidou, Library of Congress, and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston.
Coën has a secondary practice in creating Narrative Spaces/ Exhibition Design and has co-created museum exhibitions such as at the Civil Rights Museum, MoCADA, the Alice Austen House Museum. She is currently developing two legacy museums in Kingston, Jamaica.
Nadia lives in the corners, where she weaves cobwebs by smashing mirrors into an analog dream.
First, everything is transparent, a curtain behind the curtain. Then comes the opacity. There is a hole in the word and an eye looking back inside it. Translucent entities emerge from the corners. A mantra of book titles praises the certainty of wood. The agency of light is reversed through the floor bouncing off the ceiling, dry water, and the peeling of flashlights drawn on the bark of the trees. Those flashlights are pendulums oscillating between the cold of the glass and the warmth of the flesh. Magenta and yellow sleep together but split their reveries.
How many touches lie numb in the tangle of guitar strings, rings that are prisms of the black and white rainbow?
“Light never gets old”, we hear as the only answer.
— Enrique Enriquez, Historian
INTERPRETATIONS
In the beginning Coën reaches for word: exhaling letters, arranging/re-arranging/permutating/according to her intentionality to provoke fire, arouse fluidity, bestow air…
Constant movement of placing/dis/placement disempowers old stale ways of hiding, asking for courage to allow the hidden light, the light of beginning, to illuminate a walkabout on her ground of shattered mirrors.
And in the ways of her ancestors she gathers the broken shards of light, waters the mystical upside down tree to sing an alchemical song with inanimate guitar strings still resonating the song of wilderness, the dance of spirit and matter.
Coën’s poetics yearn towards justice, her call is the timeless desire of artist-as-partner in conjuring the inner essence of the many-colored-robes of outward appearance.
— Tabita Shalem, Poet
Nadia Coen creates a world that has yet to be seen. Whether her worlds are made from texts, reflections, projections, or solid matter, she describes a subconscious landscape that feels both ancient and familiar. This dimension of existence that Nadia describes is overlooked and hard to build, but with her work she calls attention to its existence. Through the process of accident and restructuring, she creates a spatially unfamiliar and new way of reading that is both sublime and surreal. Her complex process of discovery requires an incredible amount of patience, curiosity and perseverance and the quality of her work reflects this dedication.
When I first met Nadia in 1985, while at the NYU School of Art, she was working on large canvases made from found materials covered in dark textural fabrics that resembled ancient and floating continents. Through her wildly physical painting process, she was looking for inherent meaning in the act of the engagement with the language of the tactile. Since then her work has evolved dramatically but her pursuit of the language remains the same. No longer hidden under raw materials, Nadia’s present language of practice reflects her fall into a transcendent dreamscape and her works are remnants of what she has seen there.
— K. Merz, Ph.D.