Tawfik Naas
Instead, It Bore a Tulip
19 July- 2 August 2025
“Instead, It Bore a Tulip” marks an evolution in Tawfik Naas’s long-term research-led practice, now in its eighth year. Investigating the failure of the Libyan government’s ‘Great Manmade River’ project; proposed under then-leader Muammar Gaddafi as the world’s largest irrigation system, Naas’ research practice seeks to portray the trauma and disruption inflicted on communities by the project’s collapse, which stemmed from a range of complex problems and ultimately forced his own family to migrate. Known for his sustained engagement with historical trauma, ecological time, and inherited memory, Naas presents a new body of 2D work that signals a shift from research as a tool for understanding to research as a foundation for belief.
In earlier iterations of the research such as “Chaos Is a Flower”, the past was approached through formal reconstructions: fractured timelines, germinating seeds and speculative ecology. In this new exhibition, the past is not explicitly revisited but rather folded into the present as a more intuitive undercurrent. History is not linear or archival but becomes atmospheric, felt, absorbed, and metabolised through image. Naas applies his choice of mediums so as to diffuse across surfaces, pigment seeps and stretches echoing an attempt to remember the past; a resurfacing which is often blurred or unresolved.
The title speaks to a moment of deviation. In biology, atavism refers to the reappearance of a trait or characteristic in an organism that had disappeared in previous generations, but was present in distant ancestors. Where one might expect a repetition of form or meaning, something else emerges. “Instead, It Bore a Tulip” speaks to that moment of unpredictable transformation, atavistic yet unfamiliar, quietly radical. The works do not seek to represent singular events or clear narratives. Instead, they are reticent, haunted by histories that are never named but still present.
In this exhibition, Naas offers an expanded cosmology of the past: one where time loops, furls, and unfurls rather than progresses. A new vantage point is approached; one that is less concerned with recovering what has been lost, rather more attuned to what is continuously resurfacing.
In earlier iterations of the research such as “Chaos Is a Flower”, the past was approached through formal reconstructions: fractured timelines, germinating seeds and speculative ecology. In this new exhibition, the past is not explicitly revisited but rather folded into the present as a more intuitive undercurrent. History is not linear or archival but becomes atmospheric, felt, absorbed, and metabolised through image. Naas applies his choice of mediums so as to diffuse across surfaces, pigment seeps and stretches echoing an attempt to remember the past; a resurfacing which is often blurred or unresolved.
The title speaks to a moment of deviation. In biology, atavism refers to the reappearance of a trait or characteristic in an organism that had disappeared in previous generations, but was present in distant ancestors. Where one might expect a repetition of form or meaning, something else emerges. “Instead, It Bore a Tulip” speaks to that moment of unpredictable transformation, atavistic yet unfamiliar, quietly radical. The works do not seek to represent singular events or clear narratives. Instead, they are reticent, haunted by histories that are never named but still present.
In this exhibition, Naas offers an expanded cosmology of the past: one where time loops, furls, and unfurls rather than progresses. A new vantage point is approached; one that is less concerned with recovering what has been lost, rather more attuned to what is continuously resurfacing.
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Tawfik Naas is a Libyan practitioner based in London whose work explores how historic trauma is carried, remembered, shared, and transformed. Naas borrows from ecological systems and transposes them into environments that offer alternative ways of witnessing the past. His practice merges histories with cosmologies of people, plants, light, and spirit; an approach shaped by his ongoing research into ecological and cosmological perspectives. Over the past eight years, he has examined the entanglement of natural resources, memory, and place, cultivating spaces where resilience and renewal emerge through the regenerative rhythms of the natural world.
Prices on Application. Please email sam@boldinggallery.com or esme@boldinggallery.com if interested.