Who is Nour Kuri?

By Clarisa Toledo

Perhaps she herself is a Presence, someone who comes and brings us messages from that time and that place through which she traveled through pain, through absence. She took all the risks, as in a game of chess, and came back to give us her life strategies.

What a beauty it was to meet by chance and think that you were someone else, someone I knew maybe more than 30 years ago. It was not a mistake, I know that now. That was the precise "meeting" place to cross paths because the first rain of the year, which came in March, pushed us just to recognize each other. We made an appointment for after my birthday. We would meet again on April 4 in the morning, the day of the opening of your exhibition. Throughout the week I made every attempt to bring your name from my memory... Who am I going to interview? The day came and I confess that I thought about canceling more than once, I resisted, but the signs were clear, a call, a voice, a confirmation. So I arrived at the Centro Cultural San Pablo, at the agreed time and we talked for more than an hour; now as I listen to the recording it was not an interview. We talked to recognize each other from another time. There you were, radiant, ready to tell about your path, about your discoveries, your revelations. How writing, language, poetry appeared in the midst of the mud, of the forms. An unprecedented time to return home and little by little turn your house into a Refuge of Presences.

The Centro Cultural San Pablo, of the Alfredo Harp Helú Oaxaca Foundation, was fully opened to host "Presencias en su intimidad" by sculptor Nour Kuri (Mexico City), an exhibition that includes a large chessboard of 4x4 meters with pieces of more than one meter each, placed in the atrium and where visitors can checkmate the lady for love. In addition to 70 pieces, which occupy from the altarpiece and the Chapel of El Rosario and all the rooms of the enclosure.

"Oaxaca for me was the biggest pain I have ever felt. I was here when I learned that my mommy had died, so Oaxaca became a thorn in my heart. That episode meant a change in my life. I never thought that separation would bring me a new life at the same time. It was a turning point. I feel that my mother sent me my encounter with clay as a gift. The Nour you see now is the most realized, the one that flies in freedom. Each work has been a challenge and a very intimate encounter. I never know what will come out. I don't make sketches, I take the clay and I leave and I go, I listen to it and it listens to me".

Subscribe to read the full column...