When Desire Moheb-Zandi‘s pieces take centre stage, you’re not just looking at art – you’re feeling it. Desire invites you into a world where traditional weaving techniques are paired with a fearless exploration of unexpected materials. As she prepares for Art Miami Basel, Desire reflects on the raw power of touch, memory, and identity in her art. Through monumental tapestries and soft sculptures, she weaves narratives that aren’t just seen but also felt deeply. Her works are stories in thread, deeply personal yet universally relatable, and they’ll leave you questioning how we define culture, history, and the spaces we inhabit.
hube: Your notable commissions for commercial spaces like the Etam Haussmann flagship store and Chanel’s Métiers d’Art headquarters showcase your impact in both the commercial and artistic realms. How do you approach commissions differently from personal projects, and what do you enjoy most about creating pieces for public spaces?
Desire Moheb-Zandi: It varies. I love creating pieces for public spaces and engaging in a dialogue with the public.
In the Etam Haussmann flagship store, I was commissioned to create a monumental tapestry made out of second-hand bras. I cut, assembled, and superimposed the different elements of the bras and wove them to make a multi-panel large work. I love giving new life and meaning to upcycled materials. Recycling used bras to create a monumental tapestry, for me, symbolised the link woven between all the women, near and far, involved in this project. The title of the work is Let me be me (2022).
For Chanel Métiers d’Art, we created a monumental tapestry. I was invited by the artistic director of my studio, Poush, and Chanel’s new Métiers d’Art headquarters, Le19M, to produce a large-scale work. The embroidered panels on the tapestry are in collaboration with Maison Lesage. It took five months to embroider the panels through workshops with the participation of the general public. A Fantasy Adventure (2023) plays around with the idea of an imaginary vertical game platform world in which all things and beings would be entangled together, constituting the millions of threads of a woven reality. The pixelation in platform games shares a similarity to Anatolian traditional kilim patterns.
h: Your recent exhibition, New Traditions, was your first solo show during Berlin Art Week. How does this context influence the way you approached the creation of the works, and what do you hope to achieve with this particular presentation?
DMZ: Having my solo show during Berlin Art Week was wonderful. My opening evening was especially meaningful as the gallery celebrated its 20th anniversary and marked my debut solo show in Berlin, where I was born. I don’t know how to exactly answer your question, but I am very happy to be represented by Wentrup and am looking forward to having many more dialogues together and continuing to grow in the years ahead.
h: You’ve been compared to Anni Albers in your approach to blending traditional weaving with contemporary art. How do you feel about this comparison, and in what ways do you see your work as continuing or diverging from that legacy?
DMZ: I feel I am too young to be compared to Anni Albers; she is definitely a major inspiration! We can revisit this discussion when I am 60. Anni Albers once said, ‘Along with cave paintings, threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning’. I believe in applying new ideas to the ancient craft of the loom.
As we find ourselves immersed in an increasingly virtual world, there is a growing imperative to connect with the real, with the haptic and tactile qualities inherent in physical things. Craft plays a vital role here – not to evoke nostalgia, but to embrace new materials and processes alongside tradition. In this cross-cultural technological melting pot, innovative forms of craft emerge. Textiles serve as a bridge between worlds, fusing new technologies with age-old traditions.
All I can say is that I truly love weaving, and in essence, I will keep trying to innovate within the tradition of weaving and push it into the future.
h: Your work seems to intertwine personal history and cultural identity in a unique way. How do you navigate the balance between expressing your own experiences and incorporating broader cultural motifs?
DMZ: I learned how to weave from my grandmother, and having grown up in southeastern Mediterranean Turkey, I was surrounded by textiles, cultural motifs, and symbols. Honouring this cultural heritage, it felt natural to express myself through weaving. I blend personal history and cultural identity in my sculptural woven wall works, meshing traditional techniques with modern motifs and media.
A characteristic of my work is using new materials that aren’t traditionally used in tapestry. PVC, upcycled, and industrial elements often permeate the work. It helps me to explore new sensibilities, and textures within a traditional medium. My cultural background – as the granddaughter of Uzbeks with Turkish and Iranian roots, born in Berlin, and raised in Turkey – profoundly informs my artistic practice.
h: In New Traditions, your work combines the interplay of music, weaving, and unconventional materials to create deeply textured and narrative-driven tapestries. How do you perceive the relationship between music, weaving, and the materials you use, especially recycled and upcycled materials, and how do these elements, along with your incorporation of soft sculptures, contribute to the thematic depth and emotional complexity of the exhibition?
DMZ: Weaving is a form of digital technology; it operates on a binary code like a computer. Warp and weft threads are used instead of ones and zeros. Like a digital image composed of pixels, a textile’s pattern consists of a matrix of encoded data written specifically for computation by a loom, which resembles a music score. In a way, a loom can be considered a type of computer processor, and a textile, a tactile interface.
When constructing the wall pieces, I am guided by my intuition and work without preparatory sketches. The thread and the rhythm of the loom dictate the composition, thus becoming the score. It is a mutual interplay that can be compared to the relationship between a conductor and the orchestra. I synchronise the various materials, just as a conductor organises the orchestra. The result is a melody – a textile score. The loom feels like a musical instrument I keep wanting to play. It is a labour-intensive process and a full-body experience where hand, eye, feet, and machine come together to produce the woven piece. It’s a logical, constructive process, much like learning to speak a language or play an instrument. You have to practise enough to think in textile terms. I feel like I’m making songs on the loom. I’ve created art in places like New York, LA, Brazil, Turkey, and Paris. I experiment with new materials, textures, and techniques wherever I am, using whatever fibres and materials are locally available. Each location I work in influences the materials I select, which impacts my work in unique ways. In New York, a lot of upcycled PVC, rubber, synthetic netting, and tubing entered my work; in Brazil, lots of neon threads and natural materials; in Paris, I used upcycled advanced fibres from the Italian textile company Vimar1991, recycled bras, found metal, and reflective threads.
Through the loom, I synthesise these upcycled and purchased materials around me. I enjoy mixing natural materials like wool and velvet with upcycled/found materials like PVC and rope. This approach allows me to break away from traditional textile art techniques and provoke a wide range of emotions with haptic and optical complexity – simultaneously natural, synthetic, and sculptural. By incorporating these unconventional materials, I’m able to weave narratives that are just as much about the materials themselves as the patterns they form.
The soft sculptures form a poetic cocoon that contains my thoughts. Notes and poems that I write on small pieces of paper during or after completing the work are sewn into the sculpture. They hold a quiet secret between me, the work, and the textile score put into words. These sculptures enhance the narrative, bringing the tactile and emotional aspects of the tapestry to life, connecting the physicality of the woven material with the intangible concepts that flow through my art.
