Dala Nasser works with sound, performance, film, and painting to create immersive installations that emphasize material transformation over time and bear witness to places impacted by conflict and climate change. Trained as a painter at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London and the Yale School of Art in New Haven, she was awarded the 2017 Emerging Artist Prize at the Sursock Museum’s 32nd Salon d’Automne in Beirut. While her work is multidisciplinary, Nasser draws on her practice as a painter and her family’s heritage as farmland owners to respond to histories embedded in specific locations. Shown as fragments, as draped tarps, stretched on wood to form makeshift structures, or sometimes accompanied by sound, her canvases are the result of intensive processes of making and unmaking. Repeated actions of marking, soaking, burying, rubbing, and dyeing with plants from her own garden make her works indexes of place, alternate and abstracted views of the landscapes that themselves evolve with time. The weathering and deterioration of her working materials become the visual markers of systemic failure and environmental degeneration.

In Mineral Lick (2019) Nasser probes Lebanon’s unique regional position as a water-rich nation to examine water distribution and toxicity in her hometown of Beirut. Using tap water from all sixty sectors of Beirut, which is known for its heavy rains that flow down the mountains and seep into an aging underground pipe infrastructure, Nasser creates her own abstracted hydromap of the city. The artist mixes equal parts dye and rock salt to each gallon of water before submerging fabric into each sample. The fabric autonomously grows its own salts in response to the varying acidity levels of each neighborhood’s water supply. The installation suggests the poisonous impact of inaction and ineffectiveness in a shifting context where language and political legitimacy have lost value. During its first showing at an exhibition at Ashkal Alwan, The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts in Beirut in 2019, Mineral Lick was displayed for a single evening before the street protests of the October 17 Revolution—in response to a series of cabinet-issued tax reforms—brought the country to a standstill.