Dala Nasser (she/her)
b. 1990 TYRE
Based between LEBANON/UK
As an artist working through abstraction and alternative forms of image-making, Dala 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, 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 landscape. 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.
Education
2019-2021 MFA Painting, Yale School of Art, Yale University, New Haven, USA
2012-2016 BFA Fine Arts, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London, UK
2011-2012 Foundation Diploma in Fine Arts, Central Saint Martins University of Art and Design, London, UK