Material as a Witness to History in Dala Nasser’s Art

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 249, ‘Object Lessons’

In the work of Dala Nasser, material operates as a witness to historical and political conditions, and their processes of erasure. In past works, this witnessing is embodied within the material itself, through dyeing, staining and washing fabrics with charcoal, local red clay, indigo, plants, insects and ashes, rubbed against the surfaces of ancient archaeological sites and traces of historical habitation in Lebanon, which become transformed into spectral painterly and architectural forms carrying haptic traces of their past existence and meaning (Adonis River, 2023, and Tomb of King Hiram, 2022).

Nasser’s upcoming exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel marks a shift in her work, through the question of when a site becomes memory as a result of its material dismantling. Occupying the entire gallery, the still-untitled installation constructs an exact-scale re-materialization of a currently inaccessible site: the ruined sixth-century church of St. Christopher, Kabr Hiram, in the village of Qana, adjacent to Nasser’s family home and studio in southern Lebanon, near the Israeli border. Fabrics rubbed with clay powders evoking the limestone walls of the church hang vertically from wood structures, while two wooden walkways look down on a large area of blue cyanotypes re-creating the building’s large mosaic floor. Excavated by the French philologist and biblical scholar Ernest Renan in 1860, the original floor was extracted and brought to Paris on Napoleon III’s orders, where it remains on display in the Louvre.

The creation of cyanotypes printed on fabric to represent the floor introduces the photographic into Nasser’s work for the first time and, with it, images – but not the colonial gaze of the camera. The cyanotype technique is closer to the process of making the mosaic itself, producing an image through the placement of fragments on a horizontal surface. The resulting imprint – produced from iron salts, potassium, water and sunlight – is made of shadow but without a direct material or pictorial verisimilitude to the original surface. The blue images are blurry, as memory is, in contrast to the full colour photographic documentation of the floor, or a direct viewing of it, which reveal it to be composed from the daily life of the local farming community for which the church was built. Four large, decorated jars hold tree branches sprouting into interwoven circles (a symbol of eternity), adorned with local plants, birds and domestic and wild animals. Interwoven with this abstracted landscape are the four seasons that sustain it, as well as angels, saints and portraits of the farmers, who collectively hired and paid for the mosaic artist to design the floor, fusing the spiritual site with the land on which, and the people for whom, it was built – and of which Nasser and her family are an inextricable part.

The artist’s re-creation of the floor is, then, not an image of it, but a re-mapping of the community and place that brought it into being. Its spectral appearance renders visible its absence from both, just as the Kunsthalle Basel becomes a doppelganger of the gallery in the Louvre where the original floor resides, separated from its ruined architectural site. The dislocated traces of the church in both museums mark the trauma and uncertainty that have come to define the land at the southern Lebanese border; an inaccessible place where things are forever being interrupted, whether by a phone signal that cuts out, bombing or colonial archaeological extraction. In a smaller adjacent gallery, the sounds of wind, water, soil and a boat imagine the moment of the floor’s extraction, in an aural echo of the cyanotypes’ depiction of its absence, through an imagined memory. Unlike earlier works, the installation can be entered, like the original church; our footsteps, walking over the floor’s blue images, mark them, registering their vulnerability and our collective implication in the histories that made them.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 249 with the headline ‘On Fragments’

Dala Nasser will be on view at Kunsthalle Basel from 15 May – 10 August

^{Main image: Dala Nasser, Adonis River (detail), 2023, installation view, Renaissance Society. Courtesy: © Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; photograph: Bob.}