Artist Talk: Dala Nasser with Zena Agha
Please note this talk features discussion of violence, death and grief as a result of war and genocide. There is also a reference to suicide.
This is an edited recording of an in conversation between exhibiting artist Dala Nasser and Palestinian-Iraqi writer Zena Agha. In Spring 2026 we presented Nasser's solo exhibition Cemetery of Martyrs in our galleries, featuring a large-scale sculptural and sonic installation that invites audiences into a collective space of mourning and remembrance. Dala Nasser is an artist working through abstraction and alternative forms of image-making, who integrates sound, performance and film in her practice, but remains quintessentially a painter as she thinks through abstraction and the medium’s most elementary materials: fabric, pigments, stretcher bars, and mark making. In her practice, Dala understands material not only as form but as a witness to historical conditions, marked by the enduring forces of colonial systems and the ecological and psychological disintegration they cause. Her works emerge through processes in which materials act as agents of memory and testimony. She works with natural elements such as soil, ash, clay, charcoal, plants, and insects, each intimately tied to the landscape and applied to fabric through acts of staining, soaking, dyeing, and rubbing. Often created via frottage on land or spiritual sites, these works serve as archives: porous surfaces that register the traces of lived experience and environmental transformation foregrounding non-claimed histories, ecologies of slow violence, and colonial theft in times and places where human language has been rendered insufficient or out of reach. Zena Agha is a Palestinian-Iraqi writer, poet and multi-disciplinary artist from London. She is the author of Objects from April and May (Hajar Press, April 2022), and her short film, The Place that is Ours, co-directed with Dorothy Allen-Pickard, premiered on Nowness in November 2021. She completed her PhD in colonial mapping and de-colonial counter-mapping in Palestine.
This recording documents an artist talk presented at Nottingham Contemporary as part of our Live Programme, which shares discussions, performances and events from across our programme.
The views expressed are those of the speakers and reflect their artistic research, perspectives and lived experiences.