In the purple, 2021
Install View DEBORAH SCHAMONI
This series of works is accompanied by the video production The Dead Shall Be Raised; explores questions around how we continue to witness and record that which can’t be recorded. Nasser deploys various tools such as 3d renderings, text, landscape/seascape scenes and processual documentation to further reveal the human and non-human entanglement in the perpetually deteriorating environmental, historical and political conditions.
The Dead Shall Be Raised takes us through undulating scenes of a lost city under sea, the story of King Hiram and his offerings, an inverted blurry present of urban sprawling and the documentation of the artist’s process of archeological rubbings. Nasser destabilizes our sense of what is real, what is lost, what remains and what could be through an intentional conflation of history, myth and material being. As in previous works but through moving image this time, Nasser continues to insist on creating an autonomous narrator, one that breaks away from the dominant discourse that is built on delusion and myth. The act of rubbing, the use of charcoal and then submerging the dated cotton in the sea to fade out what she had been diligently doing under the sun and sky are all parts of a practice of survival but also a reclamation and questioning of what might have been lost. Her insistence doesn’t come from a utopian desire to record history but it’s a real scratching and questioning, an attempt at exposing the fragility of structures that have been constructed for decades based on histories and experiences that cannot be recorded be they historical, cultural or social. The Dead Shall Be Raised begs the question of how we record myth and delusion and how do we escape structures so rigidly built on them now.
The purple, the red, the mapping and the finality of the paintings on display in the exhibition are all part of the labour and embodiment of the passage of time and the act of bearing witness to it. The paintings are made through a process of Charcoal Rubbings of the archeological remnants in Tyre, on discarded fabric from her grandfather’s house in South Lebanon, submerged in salty water and then dyed with a crimson and purple natural dye made of flowers from the area. What is left after the tumultuous process of making these paintings somehow still maps erasure, they reveal traces of abstract landscapes and ecologies in some, and what appears as a new language of time in others.
The powerful works of Nasser are a reminder of the cyclical weaponization of archeology and artifacts throughout history. What we are left with are structures that hold different memories and meanings to what they have been prescribed to represent today. They remain in their glorified or neglected forms the sole witness to futures; silently. The waves and currents change, what is buried might resurface and the foundations that have always been holding histories – be they myth, delusional or ‘real’- can be washed away or eroded.
Many thanks to Mophradat who kindly supported the video production.
Dala Nasser - Director
Jad Youssef - Cinematographer and editor
Mhamad Safa - Sound designer and composer
Jawad Al Amin - Diver and go pro operator
Sabine Saba - Animator
Toni Geitani - Equipment
Leen Charafeddine - Designer
Dala Nasser, In the Purple, installation view at Deborah Schamoni Munich 2021.