Xíloma. MCCCLXXXVI, 2025
Commissioned by Kunsthalle Basel.
In her new 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 kind of presence.
Nasser presents the site through deliberate fragmentation, constructing a framework from simple wooden beams that evoke the contours of the lost church. Fabrics dyed with pigments sourced from the surrounding environment such as earth, plants, and sediment hang from this structure. They reference the church’s absent walls and absorb the traces of the land. Cyanotype-treated textile strips depict the original mosaic floor to scale. As architectural remnants erode and return to Earth’s natural cycles, the ruins become mutable, merging with their environment. The artist’s work resists monumentalization; instead, it renders absence perceptible, registering the ruptures of war, migration, and colonialism in spatial and material terms.
The sixth-century mosaic departs from conventional Byzantine iconography. Rather than depicting sacred figures or religious scenes, it portrays rural life, local flora and fauna, and the seasonal cycles of agricultural labor. Its imagery suggests a collective act of self-representation, commissioned by the surrounding community. In the nineteenth century, the mosaic was excavated and removed under the auspices of the colonial “Mission de Phénicie”. It was transferred to the Louvre in Paris, where it remains today, dislocated from its original context and reframed as a masterpiece of Byzantine heritage. By titling her work MCCCLXXXVI, Nasser references the 1,386 years the mosaic was embedded in its homeland before relocated to France. This span of time becomes a measure not only of historical distance but of cultural erasure, reflecting how narratives are constructed through acts of removal and reframing.
Today, the ruins of the church are inaccessible and irreparably damaged due to ongoing aggression. 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. In privileging contact, duration, and gesture over mechanical reproduction, these prints become reflections on loss, presence, and the impossibility of return.
The installation unfolds across three exhibition spaces as an acoustic theater, structured through a sound work composed in collaboration with the architect and composer Mhamad Safa. 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 becomes a space of layered vocal dialogue, rhythmically anchored in Byzantine chant. Two voices interweave, one that speaks from the mosaic’s enduring memory, and the other from the experience of a migrant crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Together, both voices resonate of collective loss and the far-reaching effects on displacement. In the third room, the ambient reverberations of the Louvre linger, a distant echo of the institution that now holds the mosaic.
This sonic progression is mirrored in the visual language of the installation. From room to room, structural and material elements including wooden scaffolds and cyanotype prints gradually recede. What begins as a tangible reconstruction of the ruined church gradually diminishes, leaving only spectral remains. This spatial movement parallels the historical dislocation of the mosaic itself, its removal emblematic of broader patterns of cultural extraction. It can further be understood as a reflection on the progression of movement from the Mediterranean Sea into Europe — whether by human beings or artifacts—and the stark differences in porousness. While objects are permitted to circulate freely, traversing the seas and migrating across borders, human movement is obstructed, regulated, and denied.
In Xíloma. MCCCLXXXVI, Nasser moves beyond a singular engagement with place to confront the broader conditions through which history is fragmented, inherited, or erased. The installation addresses not only the destruction of a specific architecture site but also the layered history of its appropriation, how cultural forms are removed, reinterpreted, and ultimately severed from their points of origin. The mosaic floor serves as a lens through which to view the region’s complex dynamics of one whose natural and cultural resources have long been subject to extractive violence, and colonial intervention. The landscape bears the marks of these forces, in the scars, absences, and silences, that evidence its ruptured continuities. Rather than seeking resolution, Nasser’s work insists on exposure, registering the lingering presence of displacement across time and space.