Artworks

Dala Nasser Lebanese: b.1990 Based in Beirut, Dala Nasser received a BFA in Fine Arts with focus on painting from UCL’s Slade School of Arts in London in 2016. Nasser’s practice centres around questions of material and process, content and context, leading to works that evolve autonomously over time. For Nasser, ideas reveal themselves in materiality and her work becomes a trace or document of concept, aimed at redefining the perception of abstract painting as a political medium. To this end, she incorporates a variety of found and appropriated materials – such as trash, turmeric, trauma blankets, Lebanese flags and sand from Karbala, Iraq – in order to question painting’s norms, production and the expectations placed upon it. In the large-scale work It’s only a party if you sniff it…, 2016, Nasser has used trauma blankets as a ground, their reflective, fragile qualities and direct relationship to the aftermath of trauma, reframing a painterly territory to navigate notions of power and powerlessness, as well as threatened – and threatening – states and spaces.