When you think about what goes into making a piece of art, a few materials probably come to mind. Paint, canvas, marble, maybe clay. Chewing gum that has spent years in someone's mouth? Probably not.

But for some artists, the most interesting materials are the ones nobody would think to use. A stick of butter becomes a classical sculpture. A handful of pistachio shells turns into something almost otherworldly. Even mushrooms can become opera singers.

And while the materials might sound like the beginning of a very strange shopping list, there is a lot more going on here than simply trying to surprise people. For these artists with roots across MENA, what they choose to work with is often just as important as what they make.

Most people use butter to make breakfast. Egyptian-born artist and designer Laila Gohar has rather different plans for it.

She creates elaborate, often surreal installations using food — butter sculptures that look like they belong in a classical museum, furniture made from bread, and arrangements that could easily be mistaken for contemporary sculpture until someone takes a bite.

What makes her work particularly interesting is that it isn't necessarily meant to last. Unlike most artworks, which museums spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to preserve, Gohar's creations are often designed to be eaten, shared or dismantled.

Her work has also made its way into the fashion world, with collaborations involving Prada, Hermès and other major brands. But whether she is creating an installation for a luxury event or an elaborate dinner table, the idea remains wonderfully simple: food doesn't have to stay on the plate.

At first glance, Salman Khoshroo's portraits look like paintings made with impossibly thick brushstrokes. Step a little closer, and things get confusing.

The Iranian artist creates human faces using industrial polymer and thick strands of wool, building up layers of material until a recognisable expression begins to emerge. The results sit somewhere between painting and sculpture, with colours and textures that almost seem to move.

Some of his portraits are made from long, colourful strands of yarn arranged in sweeping gestures. Others use soft, viscous polymer that looks as though someone has squeezed an enormous tube of paint directly onto a face.

And perhaps the most fascinating part is watching him work. What begins as a pile of material gradually becomes a person, complete with an expression that feels surprisingly alive.

What do you usually do with chewing gum when you are finished with it? Throw it away, obviously. Turkish artist Eda Sütunç had another idea: keep it... for years.

Her installation Synthetic Genesis (2024) contains pieces of gum that she chewed herself and collected over several years. She preserved them inside transparent resin modules, connecting them into a large structure resembling a strand of DNA. As if that weren't unusual enough, the installation also includes ceramic wisdom teeth and strangely mutated strawberries.

But this isn't just an elaborate way of showing off an unusual collection. For Sütunç, chewing gum is connected to stress and repetitive habits, while the DNA-like structure raises questions about what our bodies inherit and how they might change over time.

Iranian-American artist Nima Jeizan has a rather unusual studio ritual. He invites friends over, serves Persian tea and asks them to help shell pistachios. The shells don't end up in the rubbish, they become part of his sculptures.

Jeizan works with an unlikely combination of materials: dried pomegranates, pistachio shells, horsehair, animal horns, brass and glass. He dyes, drills, stitches and assembles them into strange, almost living forms that look as though they belong to some imaginary species.

Take Motherlode (2024), which combines dried pomegranate, pistachio shells, horn, horsehair and metal. Or Enter My Husk (2024), in which hand-dyed pistachio shells become part of an intricate sculptural object.

For Jeizan, who grew up between Tehran and Virginia, these materials also carry memories of Iranian culture, migration and belonging. And perhaps that is what makes the work so compelling: the familiar ingredients of everyday life end up looking like nothing you have seen before.