Arthur Cohen Weaves Memory, Myth, and Diaspora in “I Dress Ghosts”

At the entrance to rue des Filles du Calvaire, three figures meet you before you have fully crossed the threshold. Painted in titanium white on raw linen, bound with rabbit-skin glue and finished with a warm glaze of raw umber and sienna, they read less as paintings than as carvings — a triptych in the lineage of Bacon, presences that rise from the surface rather than rest on it. It is a deliberate ambush. Arthur Cohen began as a painter, with oil and portraits, long before he wove a single thread, and to return to the canvas for this show was, he says, to face his own beginnings.

That doubling — origin and arrival, the thing made and the thing inherited — runs through everything in I Dress Ghosts, the exhibition Cohen opened on May 12. For years he has been building the Weaver’s Guild, La Guilde des Tisserands: a parallel mythology of weavers, alter egos, and ancestors that has lived in the margins of his practice. With this show, the fiction stepped off the wall and into the room. The figures he had imagined for a decade finally stood at their true scale, looking out from their wooden columns, dressed in everything that makes up who he is.

We spoke across two conversations — one rooted in the philosophy of the Guild, the other in the show itself — about textile as a first language, the Sentier of his grandparents, AI as a digital sketchbook, and what it means to clothe what drifts.

An Ecosystem, Not a Collection: The Weaver’s Guild

WHITEWALL: You describe your practice as an ecosystem blending reality and fiction. How did that idea take root, and how has it evolved into what you now call the Weaver’s Guild?

ARTHUR COHEN: It didn’t come to me as a concept; it came out of necessity. I work where different worlds meet — fine art, textile heritage, cultural mixing, the balance between handmade work and symbols. What I make isn’t a collection of pieces but an ecosystem, a place where fictional characters, craft, personal stories, and cultural references all exist together without hierarchy. The Weaver’s Guild grew out of that space. It’s my way of naming the unseen community of influences, ancestors, and alter egos shaping everything I do. In my work, the Weaver is someone who builds identity by layering, adding, repeating gestures that hold memory. What started as my own story is becoming something more open, more universal. The Guild is alive; it’s a belief system.

“The Guild is alive; it’s a belief system,”

-Arthur Cohen.

Between Algiers and Paris: An Inheritance in Thread

WW: Where does your interest in the relationship between Orient and Occident come from?

AC: I was born and raised in Paris, but I always felt between worlds. My family is from Algiers, and they carried the memory of a North African Jewish community that was uprooted almost overnight in 1962. They arrived in France with almost nothing and started over in the textile business — a very Mediterranean, cross-cultural field. For me the Orient isn’t exotic; it’s part of home. The fabric on the table, the patterns on my grandmother’s Hermès scarf, the gestures and rituals in our house were never called “Oriental,” but they were always there. At the same time I’m Parisian, French, trained in Western art at the highest level. These two worlds aren’t in conflict. When I weave metallic thread with linen, add a Hebrew ornament to a crocheted cap, or drape a silk scarf in Western luxury patterns over a figure that looks both ancient and urban, I’m not making a statement about East and West. I’m showing what it feels like to be myself.

WW: Your grandparents arrived in Paris from Algiers in 1962 and rebuilt their lives in the Sentier, around the import and production of fabric. When did family history become artistic material?

AC: There was no single moment. It came slowly, the way inheritance does. As a child, the textile world was just the background of family life — the materials, the merchants, the way certain fabrics were handled with a respect you could feel but not explain. It wasn’t culture or history; it was home. Distance helped me see it — first elsewhere in Paris, then at the Royal College of Art in London. My pull toward textile, toward handmade things and layering, is a kind of memory. Over time I realized the questions I keep asking — about identity, displacement, what survives a rupture — are personal, not abstract. The copper thread in linen, the woven caps, the urge to cover and reveal: they’re all part of my story.

“My grandparents couldn’t return, but I can make something that holds the shape of what was lost,”

-Arthur Cohen.

WW: The Sentier is a very specific Parisian world — rolls of fabric, merchants, workshops. Are there sensory memories that still find their way into the studio?

AC: Absolutely. The smell of raw fabric, the sound of cloth being unrolled, the feel of material in your hands before you know what it will become. The Sentier taught me that material has value before it takes shape — that you understand fabric by touching it, sensing its character first. That way of working is still with me. So is accumulation. The Sentier was never minimal; it was dense, layered, overflowing. That density is in my work. My figures build up and spill over.

Weaving as First Language

WW: Weaving, for you, goes far beyond medium. What does the act represent?

AC: Weaving is my first language. Before I can put what I do into words, I have the movement — the over and under, the tension between two forces that only become something when joined. That structure shapes how I see time, memory, identity. It’s the truest way I know to show how a self is built: you don’t weave in a straight line, you go back and forth, building something dense from parts that are fragile on their own. There’s a ritual side, too — the repetition, the slow pace, the dedication to a process you can’t rush. In a world that prizes speed, weaving is my way of pushing back.

WW: Your process has been described as almost religious in its devotion. What is the role of repetition?

AC: Repetition brings depth, not limits. Doing the same thing over and over makes it feel alive rather than automatic. Something accumulates through it that you can’t get any other way — a kind of knowledge that only comes with patience. I won’t romanticize it. Some days the work takes everything and gives nothing back. But I’ve learned to trust those days. The struggle is part of the process.

Arthur Cohen Living in the In-Between

WW: Your work exists between sculpture, garment, performance, and myth. What draws you to inhabit that in-between?

AC: It isn’t a choice; it’s how things are. No single form can hold everything I want to express. Sculpture gives presence but not the intimacy of something worn. Clothing has that closeness but can collapse into fashion. Performance adds time and movement but, without a lasting object, something is missing. I use all of them at once — not as a trend, but because the work needs them. The figures I make aren’t portraits or costumes, sculptures or performances. They’re something without a name. Namelessness matters to me. Once you can fully name something, you’ve already reduced it.

WW: And how do you approach a new medium?

AC: I don’t research in the usual way — I learn by doing. I use a technique before I fully understand it, so I’m not limited by what it’s supposed to do. I’m interested in what a medium becomes when you don’t stay inside its lines. The thread connecting everything is textile. Weaving taught me to think about structure — to see that any surface, image, or form is really about what you put next to what. That logic works for prints, paintings, sculptures, or clothes. The different formats aren’t restlessness; they’re the same question in different forms.

“Once you can fully name something, you’ve already reduced it,”

-Arthur Cohen.

WW: I Dress Ghosts brings together a wider palette than I’d associated with your practice — weaving, but also crochet, beading, pattern-making, engraving, oil painting, sublimation printing, video. Was that a deliberate expansion?

AC: Each technique arrived because the work demanded it. These figures are too layered to exist in one medium. The sculptures need a shadow — the shadow becomes the sublimation prints. The sublimations need an intimate counterpart — that becomes the drypoint engravings. The oil paintings emerge as the most erased version of the figures, a presence on the verge of disappearing. What interests me is the coexistence: high craft and industrial process in the same room, celebrating the same figures. That dialogue is itself a form of contemporary savoir-faire. And video arrives last, as it always does — when a figure begins to move, something becomes possible that no static object can hold.

Alliances of Contrast: On Materials

WW: In your tapestries and installations, raw fibers merge with synthetic materials and metals. What are you seeking in these alliances of contrast?

AC: The same thing I look for everywhere: the point where things that don’t seem to fit become impossible to separate. Natural fiber and metal thread — something grown from the earth and something made in a factory. Weave them tightly and you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. That change is the work, not the result. For me, materiality is a metaphysical language; matter carries knowledge. We’re never made of just one thing, and I want my materials to show that complexity — ancient and modern, natural and industrial, strong and fragile. I’m also after honesty. My family rebuilt their lives in Paris’s textile trade, carrying memory from North Africa. That’s already a story of unlikely mixes. The copper thread in the linen is, in a way, the most personal thing I make.

“We’re never made of just one thing, and I want my materials to show that complexity,”

-Arthur Cohen.

WW: Construction materials — steel, sand, brick — appear alongside copper, brass, and natural fibers. What brings these architectural elements into the work?

AC: I see weaving as architectural. A tapestry is a structure: it holds space, divides it, marks inside from outside. Construction materials are a natural extension of that. Steel and sand carry a different memory than linen; they suggest permanence, the infrastructure of my cosmogony. Set next to copper thread and mohair, there’s a friction that interests me — the industrial and the handmade, the monumental and the personal, all at once. That tension feels like home.

Ancient and Futuristic: A Word on AI

WW: You use the word futuristic. Do you work with AI?

AC: Yes, though maybe not the way people expect. For me AI is a tool to help me think, not to make the work. It sharpens ideas; it’s a digital sketchbook that gives me images to react to, challenge, or move away from before I commit with my hands. What interests me is the mix between the oldest gestures — weaving, beading, slow handwork — and today’s technology. That’s where I find what’s modern in my practice. It’s another kind of weaving: ancient and futuristic at once.

From “Archives” to “I Dress Ghosts”

WW: Transformation is central to your work. What does it mean in the context of the Guild?

AC: Transformation isn’t a choice — it happens when a question grows too big for one medium to answer. Weaving is where I started. My solo show Archives at Honoré Gallery was both a return to that beginning and a goodbye to it; it laid out the whole journey and let me move forward. The Pirapora series, made in Brazil with the photographer Gleeson Paulino — textiles on a farm, a body, a landscape, a sunrise shoot near São Paulo — was already moving in a new direction that weaving alone couldn’t hold. Then the story behind the work became real. The Guild stopped being a backdrop and began to shape the work itself. I Dress Ghosts is the first full expression of that phase. In the Guild, transformation means each show is a step in bringing the fiction further into reality.

Dressing Ghosts

WW: I Dress Ghosts is now installed and living with an audience. Is there a piece that surprised you once it was on the wall?

AC: There’s always a moment before an opening when you stop seeing your own work — you’ve been with it too long. Then people arrive and you see it through their eyes, and it becomes real again. What surprised me most was the oil triptych. Returning to oil was a challenge; I started with oil and portraits before I ever wove, so it meant facing my own beginnings. Three figures in titanium white on linen, finished with a warm glaze — they seemed to rise from the surface, almost carved. Hung together at the entrance, like Bacon’s triptychs, they created a presence I didn’t expect. Not quite portraits, not quite sculptures. Something in between.

WW: The title is striking. Who, or what, are the ghosts you are dressing?

AC: Multiplicity is the point. The ghosts are those who didn’t make it across — my grandparents’ generation, the North African Jewish community that lived in Algiers for centuries and then, in just a few years, was gone. They survived, but lost the context that made sense of who they were. The ghosts are also parts of myself without a clear home: the side that’s Oriental but born in Paris, shaped by fashion, street culture, fine-art schools, my grandfather’s textile business. And then there are the ghosts everyone carries — the identities we inherit without choosing, the cultural memory we hold in our bodies without knowing its source. Dressing them is my way of saying: you exist, you’re real enough to be clothed. Even if you drift, you deserve a craftsman’s care and attention.

“Even if you drift, you deserve a craftsman’s care and attention,”

-Arthur Cohen.

WW: You describe a liminal identity built in layers, always unraveling and recomposing. Is it a condition you’ve made peace with, or one you’re still negotiating?

AC: Still negotiating — always. Some days the multiplicity feels like freedom: access to more registers than most, moving between worlds, never trapped in a single reading of yourself. Other days you simply want to belong somewhere completely, without footnotes, without having to explain the combination. What I’ve made peace with is the negotiation itself. I’ve stopped waiting for it to resolve. It’s exactly what weaving taught me: you don’t resolve the warp and the weft. You hold them in tension, and that tension is what gives the cloth its strength and its beauty.

The Three Figures: Ned, Yaffa Datura, Shalem

WW: Can you introduce the three figures of the Guild — who they are, and what each one carries?

AC: The Weaver’s Guild is a living fiction, a parallel presence embedded in the margins of reality — a subterranean utopia born from a world torn by modern violence: technological, colonial, identitarian. There, weaving is an act of resistance, a philosophy, a sacred language. Three figures carry the mythology.

Ned is the weaver of frequencies and guardian of ancestral knowledge. He carries pure memory, silent construction, the equilibrium of forces; his light is beige and metallic. His name echoes Ned Ludd — the ghost of the techno-critical textile workers.

Yaffa Datura is the narcissistic master of masks. He weaves in shadow, his garments falling in hanging threads like spider webs; he transforms, manipulates, questions the power of appearances. He’s named for the datura flower, whose pollen is called the devil’s breath — the voice of a cold, wounded world.

Shalem is the healer. She connects what opposes itself, practicing rituals with plants, dyes, and ancient gestures; her garment is a textile garden, earthy and green. A shaman of unification, her name drawn from ancient mythology, she carries peace and the art of mending.

They don’t preach. They bring a world into being, thread by thread, until the fiction becomes real.

The Marais Studio and What Comes Next

WW: The new studio in the Marais opens up bigger formats. What’s the first ambition for that space?

AC: Space changes what you can imagine — a small studio defines the scale of what you make. The Marais atelier lets me think differently: larger figures, more monumental installations, work you move through rather than simply look at. But the first ambition is simpler. The figures of the Guild have been growing inside me for years. They deserve a space that can finally hold them at their true size.

“I was weaving ‘I Dress Ghosts’ into existence before I realized it,”

-Arthur Cohen.

WW: What are you weaving into being now, as this chapter closes?

AC: About a year ago something began to take shape. The figures I’d imagined for years — my alter egos, the ghosts — wanted a physical presence. They wanted to become objects, to take up space. I was weaving I Dress Ghosts into existence before I realized it. That show answered everything Archives had started: the archive turned real, the mythology became sculpture, and the figures finally stood in the room, looking out from their wooden columns. Now I’m in the space that comes after a chapter ends. I can sense the next question coming, even if I don’t yet know what it is.