Nuno Reis is a Portuguese artist based in London whose practice moves between object-making, installation, and archival research. Working with materials that carry the residue of domestic life — worn fabric, found objects, craft traditions — he examines how suppressed histories survive in the bodies and spaces that were never meant to speak. His work is also a pedagogic proposition: that making is a form of knowing, and that embodied practice reaches places conventional research cannot.
Family Straight-Jacket
‘Family Straight-Jacket’ begins with a family lunch and a photo album. Through a series of conversations, family members identified moments where their capacity for meaningful growth was suppressed — by expectation, by silence, by the structures families build around themselves.
The straight-jacket emerged from those conversations. Made as both object and archive, it holds the words spoken against the skin that couldn't speak freely. Making was the method: the physical construction of the artifact was itself an act of research, turning lived experience into transmissible knowledge.
DEUS VULT
A heart-shaped form in floral damask brocade, pierced by rusted rhinestone-headed nails and surrounded by toy water guns. The words — God wills it — are embroidered directly onto the surface.
The sacred heart as weapon. Faith as justification. An object that sits within a broader practice examining how authoritarian regimes weaponise culture — the ornamental surface concealing, and eventually revealing, the violence beneath.