Xíloma. MCCCLXXXVI, 2025

Commissioned by Kunsthalle Basel.

In her commission for Kunsthalle Basel, Dala Nasser turns to a site where little remains, where presence has faded into absence and history survives only in fragments. Located between Tyre and Qana in southern Lebanon, the ruins of the Church of St. Christopher now lie embedded within largely inaccessible terrain. Rather than treating the ruins as symbols of decay, Nasser approaches them as sites of reflection, where absence becomes a form of presence.

The simple wooden beams outline the contours of the lost church.  The dyes of the fabrics sourced from its  surrounding environment, the earth, plants, and sediment, frame its absence. Cyanotype-treated textile strips represents the original mosaic floor to scale.  When architectural remnants erode and return to Earth’s natural cycles, the ruins become mutable, merging with  its  environment. The artist’s work resists monumentalization—capturing ruptures of war, migration, and colonialism.

In Xíloma. MCCCLXXXVI, Nasser moves beyond a singular engagement with a site, confronting the broader conditions  of  history being  fragmented, inherited, or erased. Ruins of history are simultaneously layered with not only its destruction but its its appropriation—removal, reinterpretation, and severance from its origin.  A region subjected to extractive violence and colonial intervention undeniably bears the marks of these forces in its scars, absences, and silences. The displacement across time and space which lingers in the region are exposed in Xíloma.

Today, Church of St. Christopher is inaccessible and irreparably damaged due to the ongoing violence. Unable to use her usual method of frottage, Nasser turns to cyanotype for the first time in her practice. As an alternative form of image making, this early photographic process relies on sunlight, iron salts, water, and time to create deep blue images through direct contact rather than distant capture. What is exposed to light turns cyan blue. What is shaded remains pale white, preserving the outline of whatever is absent. For this work, Nasser arranged sand, soil, and terracotta bricks on fabric to recreate the mosaic motifs, registering their presence as spectral impressions, and echoing the compositional logic of mosaic-making: layered, incremental, and site-specific. Rather than mechanical reproduction, through contact, duration, and gesture, prints reflect Church of St. Christopher’s loss, presence and impossibility of return.

The installation unfolds across three exhibition spaces as an acoustic theater. Each room stages a distinct sonic scene. In the first, recordings from the Strait of Gibraltar and the Lebanese coastline merge into a fluid maritime soundscape. The second, layered vocal dialogue is rhythmically anchored in Byzantine chant. Two voices interweave: one speaks from the mosaic’s enduring memory and the other, from the experience of a migrant crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Together, the voices resonate collective loss and the lingering effects of displacement. In the third, the ambient reverberations of the Louvre—the institution which now holds the mosaic—echoes.

Spatial design MüllerAprahamian
Sound composition Mhamad Safa