Kunsthalle Basel

Dala Nasser (* 1990) works through abstraction and alternative forms of image-making. Integrating sound, performance and film in her practice, Nasser remains quintessentially a painter as she thinks specifically through this medium and its most elementary materials: fabric, pigments, stretcher bars, lines. Her indexical paintings of land, made through direct contact on location, stand in opposition to the sweeping vistas offered by traditional landscape painting. Considering materials as witnesses, she has developed a growing body of work that foregrounds non-claimed histories, ecologies of slow violence, colonial theft, and infrastructural failure in times and places where human language has been rendered insufficient or out of reach. For her initial exhibition in Switzerland at Kunsthalle Basel, Nasser envisions a reconstruction of the Byzantine church of Kabr Hiram in Qana, Lebanon—a site now no longer extant, in a landscape that is impassable. As part of this project, she works for the first time with image through cyanotype-treated fabrics, making lost spaces tangible.