We are thrilled to be presenting Cemetery of Martyrs the first solo exhibition in a major cultural institution in the UK by Dala Nasser (b.1990, Lebanon). The exhibition features a large-scale sculptural and sonic installation that invites audiences into a collective space of mourning and remembrance.
Join Dala Nasser for an Artist Talk and audience Q&A to learn more about her work on display at Nottingham Contemporary.
By using the process of frottage (the technique of taking a rubbing from an uneven surface), Nasser has transformed the gallery space into a symbolic graveyard, creating a collection of charcoal rubbings collected from the graves of seminal artists, writers, poets, filmmakers, historians and journalists from across Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and England. Representing cultural figures from the mid nineteenth century (specifically the Nahda, Arab Renaissance) to the present day, the work honours those who fought for independence and freedom in times of political dominance and occupation and whose art, writing, and intellectual contributions have shaped the notion of true sovereignty in Western Asia.
As an artist working through abstraction and alternative forms of image-making, Dala Nasser integrates sound, performance and film in her practice, but remains quintessentially a painter as she thinks through abstraction and the medium’s most elementary materials: fabric, pigments, stretcher bars, and mark making.
In her practice, Dala understands material not only as form but as a witness to historical conditions, marked by the enduring forces of colonial systems and the ecological and psychological disintegration they cause. Her works emerge through processes in which materials act as agents of memory and testimony. She works with natural elements such as soil, ash, clay, charcoal, plants, and insects, each intimately tied to the landscap and applied to fabric through acts of staining, soaking, dyeing, and rubbing. Often created via frottage on land or spiritual sites, these works serve as archives: porous surfaces that register the traces of lived experience and environmental transformation foregrounding non-claimed histories, ecologies of slow violence, and colonial theft in times and places where human language has been rendered insufficient or out of reach.
