Tout Doit Disparaître

Nasri Sayegh

Nasri Sayegh is a multidisciplinary artist based between Beirut and Berlin. Nasri’s practice navigates between words, images, and sounds. After graduating with a degree in French Literature from Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut and at Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, he pursued his theatre studies at the École Supérieure d’Art Dramatique de Paris. As an independent actor, he has most notably been directed by Jocelyne Saab, Christian Merlhiot, Jad Youssef, Roy Samaha, amongst many others. Sayegh had solo exhibitions at the gallery of the Institut Français in Beirut first in 2016 and again in 2017, as a result of receiving the Photomed photography prize. In addition, he participated in Unravelled, a group exhibition at the Beirut Art Center in 2016. Nasri’s work originates from a desire to extract personal, often private, histories within the framework of fetishised memories. 

Tout Doit Disparaître

Nasri Sayegh's exhibition Tout Doit Disparaître features new work made between 2017 and 2018 around his ongoing manipulation of personal and found photographic archives. In response to a sentence by Stéphane Mallarmé’s fear of the blank page, Sayegh revels in his fascinations, improvisations, and the glory of uncertainty. The resulting images are troubled, obscured, and consistently imperfect. They incur an imminent threat of obliteration; leaving them anxious, adrift and lawless. Sayegh attempts to provoke the image and defy it with a pair of scissors and a needle. With his series “Résidu(s)”, the artist destroys images drawn from his collection of personal archives and reassembles them to reconstruct his own history. With his personal excavation, Sayegh unravels the thread of his stories using his mnemonic instincts. By fragmenting each image and repurposing the collateral, he unearths new forms of visual data. The entre-image (in between-image) or presque-image (almost-image) ineluctably renders the negative portrait of the artist. The exhibition also includes “Relique 26,569”, a delicate canvas stitched by the artist using white thread. Following the traits of a performance, he embroiders tirelessly using monochrome colors to emphasize on the pixel-like stitches and how they intertwine. Gestures relentlessly repeated - often in a sort of creative trance - strive to print by hand these pixels that obsess him.