For Asma Ben Aissa and Soukaina Joual, fabric transcends its materiality to become a profound way of storytelling. Both artists are a part of the Tomorrows/Today exhibition at this year’s Investec Cape Town Art Fair (ICTAF), using textiles to explore themes of identity, space, and tradition. Asma Ben Aissa, presenting with Blue Wind Project, is a Tunisian artist who sees fabric as a metaphorical thread linking architecture, environment and memory. Soukaina Joual, a Moroccan multidisciplinary artist presenting with Spiaggia Libera, approaches the medium from a different yet complementary perspective, focusing on the human body as a site of tension, identity and transformation. Together, their artistic practices redefine fabric with layers of meaning. As a media partner for ICTAF, we got the opportunity to sit down with these two emerging artists to delve deeper into their respective oeuvres.

Nataal: How does fabric function beyond its materiality in your art?

Asma Ben Aissa: Fabric is a space for exploration and liberation. It allows me to break free from certain constraints I perceive in my surroundings or social representations. Working with textiles is almost therapeutic for me – it is a medium that, in addition to carrying history and tradition, deeply influences my way of thinking and creating. It helps me overcome obstacles, reflect on my own journey, and reconnect with narratives passed down through generations. Each piece becomes a space where memory, transmission and experimentation intertwine.

Soukaina Joual: In my work, the fabric becomes a second skin, a space in which narratives can unfold. Through embroidery, I distort and abstract the body, creating forms that are at once familiar and unsettling. This approach allows me to question how bodies, particularly women's bodies, are represented and perceived. Fabric is more than just material, it is something alive, capable of absorbing time, touch and light. It carries traces of the body even in its absence.

Nataal: Can you tell us more about the works you’re presenting at this year’s ICTAF?

ABA: The works are part of a series I have been developing for several months, a continuation of my research process exploring the window in relation to intimate and imaginary landscapes. Through my travels in northern Tunisia, I met women embroiderers whose stories have shaped my reflection on the relationship between interior and exterior spaces. For me, the window is an opening into these inner worlds, a metaphor for the visible and invisible boundaries that shape our perceptions. In the context of embroidery and women’s craftsmanship in Tunisia, it also represents a passage between intimate gestures and collective transmission.

SJ: I'm presenting pieces from the Raw Body project – an exploration of the deformed and fragmented female form. Expanding on my previous project ‘Em/body/ies’, this series treats the body as a raw material that is constantly being shaped, altered and manipulated. Using embroidery and collage, I create figures that blur the boundaries between presence, absence, familiarity and distortion, in an ongoing search for a new body, a new skin. The compositions are deliberately unsettling, with fragmented bodies merging and shifting, making it difficult to distinguish one part from another.

Nataal: The Tomorrows/Today exhibition brings together artists who challenge conventional perspectives. How do you see your work contributing to this broader dialogue?

ABA: Fabric, often associated with intimacy and the domestic sphere, becomes a tool for architectural and conceptual exploration. By playing with folding, transparency and layering, I seek to deconstruct our usual perceptions of space and landscape. My practice questions deeply rooted conventions — those that categorise textiles within a specific artistic domain, those that define the boundaries between art and craft, and those that determine the place of women’s narratives in art history. By working with ancestral techniques and reinterpreting them to open up new perspectives, I aim to create a dialogue between memory and contemporaneity and between heritage and experimentation.

SJ: My work challenges how we see and interpret the human body and how we perceive its form and limitations. The Raw Body project deconstructs the female figure, deliberately distorting and fragmenting it to explore themes of transformation and disintegration. Through this, I hope to highlight the complexities and contradictions that lie within the body and question how we engage with its representation in both art and society.

Nataal: What resonates with you most about each other’s work and what connections can you see between your respective practices?

ABA: Soukaina’s choice of fabrics, how she manipulates them, and the way she experiments with different materials, strongly connect with my approach. Beyond the material itself, I also feel a connection in the way our works interact with the exhibition space. We do not treat our pieces as simple textile surfaces but as installations that engage with their environment. The exhibition space becomes a key element in how the textile is presented, and this reflection on scenography is essential in both of our practices.

SJ: I admire how Asma uses fabric to tell rich, layered stories — blending personal and collective histories through techniques like painting, embroidery and dyeing. While her work focuses on cultural symbols and heritage, and mine on the body’s reconfiguration and abstraction, both push the boundaries of traditional textile practices. What resonates with me is how her work evokes both intimacy and complexity to create space for reflection. It’s interesting to see how our practices engage with fabric in such distinct yet interconnected ways.

Investec Cape Town Art Fair. is at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) from 20-23 February 2025. Buy tickets here.

This story was created in collaboration with Letterhead.