Chloe Bensahel is a Franco-American artist who blends performance, traditional textile techniques, and emerging technologies to consider the relationship between beliefs and materials, text and textile. Inspired by her own intergenerational history of migration (Algeria, Morocco, France, USA), her work examines how materials can carry stories the way bodies do, sometimes covertly as embodied or coded language. Bensahel thus weaves, spins, tears, or strips materials from one state to another, in compositions that capture a trace of the material’s previous life. Recent works include collaborations with Google Arts and Culture on conductive thread technologies to allow textiles to speak through touch, inspired by the performative relationship to text in Judaism. Her work has been exhibited internationally including the Australian Tapestry Workshop (AUS), Le Mobilier National (FR), and the National Cathedral in Washington DC. In 2022 she completed a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the Museum of American History and the Cooper Hewitt Museum on the invention of hand-woven memory devices for NASA space missions (Magnetic Core Memory.)
Upcoming projects include a residency with the MIT media Lab researchers in 2024.