Dala Nasser: Xíloma MCCCLXXXVI

Dala Nasser works through abstraction and alternative forms of image-making. Integrating sound, performance, and film into her practice, Nasser remains quintessentially a painter, thinking specifically through this medium and its most elementary materials: fabric, pigments, stretcher bars, and lines. Her indexical paintings of land, created through direct contact on location, stand in opposition to the sweeping vistas of traditional landscape painting.

Viewing materials as witnesses, she develops a growing body of work that foregrounds unclaimed histories, ecologies of slow violence, colonial theft, and infrastructural failure—especially in times and places where human language proves insufficient or inaccessible.

For her first exhibition in Switzerland, at Kunsthalle Basel, Nasser envisions a reconstruction of the Byzantine church of Kabr Hiram in Qana, Lebanon—a site now lost, situated in an impassable landscape. As part of this project, she works for the first time with image-making through cyanotype-treated fabrics, making lost spaces tangible.