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), Mont Blanc Foundation (DE,) and Palais de Tokyo (FR.) In 2024 she completed a residency at the MIT Media Lab as part of France’s Villa Albertine program, supported by MIT’s Center for Art, Science, and Technology.
She is currently a research affiliate in Zach Lieberman’s Future Sketches Group.