In Dala Nasser’s installation practice, matter becomes an active agent in articulating ecological and political narratives, no longer functioning as a passive substrate but rather as a corporeal witness to erosion, extraction and displacement; her use of distressed textiles, makeshift timber frames and earth-stained surfaces proposes a material language of decay and resilience, where each fold, tear or sediment-infused mark operates as an index of territorial crisis, as seen in works like Adonis River and Mudborn, where layered fabrics hang, slump or envelop skeletal structures to conjure unstable geographies shaped by contamination and abandonment, and in this way, Nasser’s approach dissolves any notion of formal autonomy in sculpture, instead privileging a logic of contingency, exposure and collapse, wherein materials are not transformed into idealised forms but rather retain the visible traces of their histories, often collected directly from sites of environmental degradation or conflict; these assemblages, far from ornamental or static, function as tactile archives, repositories of violence and survival, and this sensibility is particularly resonant in her large-scale installation at MAXXI in Rome, where cloth dyed with toxic mud from Lebanon’s Litani River drapes across precarious frames, literally bearing the imprint of ecological devastation while simultaneously performing an act of resistance through presence, stain and sag; by rejecting polished surfaces and embracing processes of staining, soaking and decomposing, Nasser positions the artwork as a material protest, an aesthetic that embodies collapse rather than merely depicting it, challenging the viewer to confront the affective and political weight carried within every weathered fibre.
