Follow the Snail

Follow the Snail is the first solo exhibition in the United Arab Emirates by Münster-based Tatar artist Nazilya Nagimova. The exhibition brings together new works created specifically for her solo project at NIKA Project Space, alongside selected works from earlier projects. Despite originating from different periods, these works are united by a shared thematic core: the artist’s ongoing experiments with felt as a medium, her engagement with the long histories of Tatar mobility and settlement, and the idea of home as a mobile, vulnerable, and constantly transforming structure.

Working with felt—a traditional material of her ancestors and a technique passed down through generations of her family—Nagimova explores memory, migration, and the search for belonging. For the artist, the notion of home also encompasses something that can be reinvented in a new place: something constructed through memory, rituals, and the ability to carry and preserve lived experience.

The exhibition unfolds as a reflection on the fragility of shelter and on how personal and collective memory shape our intimate relationship to place and community.

Central to the project are the installation Jort (2025) and the video Chulpan – the Mother (2022), first presented at documenta fifteen in Kassel. The image of the jort—home—refers to the Tatar word yörtü (to carry), evoking the yurt as a dwelling that can be taken along. Although Tatar homes are no longer portable or made of wool, they are still called by the same name. The title of the installation thus becomes a word that carries a long history of the artist’s ancestral way of life and its transformation.

The installation takes the form of a snail, a creature that always carries its home with it. The spiral functions here as a universal symbol of movement and cyclicality: a form in which development occurs through repetition without severing ties to the point of origin. This spiral principle is central to the artist’s practice and recurs throughout her work.

The video Chulpan – the Mother documents the surface of a felt snail that has spent several years outdoors, exposed to rain, snow, and windstorms. Over time, its shell becomes marked by wear, gradually revealing its inner structure. Felt here becomes an image of the maternal body—warm and protective, yet vulnerable to injury. The video also incorporates texts written in Iske Imla, an obsolete Turkic-Tatar script based on Arabic calligraphy, whose disappearance symbolizes a rupture in cultural and historical continuity.

The exhibition also includes the installation Jort III (2025)—a black “house” that reflects a subsequent stage in the artist’s reflection on the notion of home in the context of forced migration, loss, polarization, and personal experience. The white and black jorts form two poles of existence, inviting viewers to consider the fragility of shelter and to question what makes a home a place of protection or, conversely, of loss. Home is approached as a processual structure, subject to change, erosion, and reinterpretation under the influence of historical, social, and personal forces.

The Metamorphoses series is inspired by the memory of the artist’s aunt, Minglëzhikhan, and engages with rituals of prayer and remembrance rooted in familial and cultural tradition. Here, prayer is approached as a process that connects different temporalities and dimensions through a profound gesture of care and love, in contrast to its conventional understanding as an abstract ritual practice.

Felt, shaped into volumetric structures, functions in this series as a metaphor for human transformation. Form is conceived as fluid and mutable, and the human being as a process of continual folding and unfolding—movement through lived experience and its limits.

In Where the Voices End, a central circular form enclosed within symmetrical geometry creates a space of attraction in which the viewer’s gaze and attention converge at a single point. The mihrab is referenced as an element of orientation within the mosque, so that the work operates like an inward niche—a threshold where prayer shifts from speech to state—an architecture of attention and orientation: a space that pulls perception inward, toward the point where voice is no longer needed. These forms are essential to understanding the broader cultural dialogue and visual code within which Nagimova operates, where Islamic architecture emerges as an architecture of attention and orientation.

The work that gives the exhibition its title, Follow the Snail, is the only non-abstract piece in the show. At the same time, its meaning remains elusive and open to interpretation. The image of the hare carries symbolic significance across many cultures and myths, yet here the artist chooses to construct her own mythology, deliberately withholding definitive explanations. Hares are among the fastest mammals in the world, yet it is precisely this speed that prevents them from catching up with the snail, positioning the work as a reflection on relativity and the ambivalence of the definitions through which we navigate the world.

Through this constellation of works, the artist constructs a system of visual and material correspondences in which corporeality, time, and cultural continuity are deeply intertwined. Felt becomes a key material for negotiating a transition from manual, tactile labor toward spiritual practices, the search for inner identity, and reflections on transformed modes of communication within present-day social realities.