Red in Tooth, 2020-2023

INstalled at the 13th Sharjah Biennial

Building on her practice as a material and process-based artist, through abstraction and alternative forms of image making, Nasser cultivates a necessary discomfort through a renewed trust in the land, its rivers, and its more-than-human inhabitants. The works trace the Al Wazzani River, which flows through southern Lebanon into Occupied Palestine.

Reverting to a seemingly ritualistic intuition, the paintings have been dug into the earth around the Wazzani, washed with collected rainwater and/or boiled in salt water, imprinted with an-other memory, reality, and futurity:  years of erosion, degradation, loss of water, pollution, and increased salinity imbued with a history of natural life, extraction, death, blood, violence, and land grabs. It is  an attempt to listen to the soil, its ailments and hopes, which has witnessed and continues to survive there.

The installation made up of individual pieces of fabric act as a palimpsest of the river, at the Sharjah Biennial 15, on four separate metal cables cutting diagonally through the courtyard and weighed down by coral rocks.  The cables intersect to form the outlines of Al Wazzani river as it moves across the landscape.

An accompanying video work of the same title negotiates and reveals other possibilities of being and relating through learning from the intricate nuances and complexities of the genuinely decolonial species, terrain, and wildlife of the land. The wildlife narrates as witnesses whose testimonies have no words and the film transitions between moving shots of a road most traveled, human produced waste, constructed borders, political signage, existing topographical markers animated as imaginary lines, the inhabitant’s voices, dead and living animals, and long, beautiful, desolate imagery of landscapes of southern Lebanon.

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Dala Nasser - Director
Jad Youssef - Cinematographer and editor
Mhamad Safa - Sound producer and composer
Jawad Al Amine - Guide and trap cam operator
Sabine Saba - Animator
Toni Geitani - Equipment
Marina Tebecherani - Color corrector
Rayyan Abdelkhalek - Translator
Leen Charafeddine - Title designer

Dala Nasser, Red in Tooth, installation view at the 15th Sharjah Biennial 2-6/2023.