When the Season Returns IV, 2023, Wall paint collected after marfa’ explosion, graphite, threads, hot glue sticks, archival glue and varnish on canvas, 86 x 98 cm. Courtesy of the Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF Private Collection).
When everything else has burned, crumbled, or washed away, Dalia Baassiri collects and crafts what remains. For more than a decade, the Lebanese artist has built her practice around different forms of what she calls “vulnerability”: ash, dust, soap foam, broken wall fragments, paraffin wax. Things that might otherwise be discarded. Things that, in her hands, become testimony.
Born in Sidon in 1981, Baassiri grew up during Lebanon’s civil war and has long questioned what it means to belong to a land in perpetual conflict. “How does one identify with a country while having spent most of childhood indoors?” she asks in her artist statement. Her work emerges from this very paradox. It is rooted in the domestic, yet speaking of a wider, fractured landscape.
When the Season Returns XXIV, 2024, Graphite, threads, hot glue sticks, organza fabric, archival glue and varnish on canvas, 96 x 117 cm. Courtesy of the Gallery Isabelle (Saradar Private Collection).
(DETAIL) When the Season Returns XXIV, 2024, Graphite, threads, hot glue sticks, organza fabric, archival glue and varnish on canvas, 96 x 117 cm. Courtesy of the Gallery Isabelle (Saradar Private Collection).
After earning a BS in Graphic Design from LAU Beirut and an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts in London, she began creating an artistic language grounded in what was close at hand; from dust to soap dusts, her earlier works such as Wiped Off and Sink-ronized used mediums from domestic life to turn ephemeral experiences into permanent structures.
Baassiri’s practice continued to evolve through international residencies from Barcelona to New York. Yet it remains grounded in Beirut, a city that, like her materials, bears the marks of survival. Her most recent exhibition in 2024, The Harvest, curated by Hannibal Srouji and held at Galerie Janine Rubeiz, brings her practice full circle. The exhibition’s works draw on materials gathered across time and space: leftover candles from prayers in Lebanon’s Harissa sanctuary, wall paint fragments from the Beirut Port explosion, and broken tree branches – some intentionally cut for to make charcoal for shisha smokers. She collects them as others might collect relics, not to preserve their beauty, but their collective story.
When the Season Returns XXXVIII, 2025, Wall paint collected from Fayyad Building (post-Beirut Explosion) graphite, threads, hot glue sticks, organza fabric, archival glue and varnish on canvas, 71 x 21 cm.
(DETAIL) When the Season Returns XXXVIII, 2025, Wall paint collected from Fayyad Building (post-Beirut Explosion) graphite, threads, hot glue sticks, organza fabric, archival glue and varnish on canvas, 71 x 21 cm.
In The Harvest’s When the Season Returns XXXVIII (2025), fragments of wall paint salvaged from the Fayyad Building post-Beirut Port explosion are assembled with acrylic, graphite, printed fabric from very early works, threads and hot glue sticks – the textures recalling tree bark wounded yet in process of healing, simulating the resin trees emit when injured—a natural phenomenon of protection and rejuvenation. If XXXVIII speaks of rupture, When the Season Returns XXXIII (2025) gestures toward renewal, with the wall paints spreading like new skin across the bark’s fissures; it is an act of mending where scars are not concealed but integrated, becoming part of the ‘endurance landscape’. Through this body of work, Dalia raises questions: Is vulnerability contagious? Do we end up embodying the places we inhabit? Does daily life in a volatile environment like Lebanon make us inherently drawn to fragments and ruptures? Am I constructing a self-portrait through these clusters of broken pieces, or is this urge to preserve and merge a form of adaptation?”
When the Season Returns XXXIII, 2025, Wall paint collected from Fayyad Building (post-Beirut Explosion) graphite, threads, acrylic, hot glue sticks, organza fabric, archival glue and varnish on canvas, 30 x 40 x 3.5 cm. Photo by Christopher Baaklini, courtesy of Galerie Janine Rubeiz.
Exhibition View, The Harvest, solo exhibition, 2024, Galerie Janine Rubeiz, Beirut. Photo by Christopher Baaklini, courtesy of Galerie Janine Rubeiz.
Baassiri’s works have resonated with audiences the world over, exhibited in Dubai, Doha, Riyadh, Paris, London, Berlin, Barcelona, Luxembourg, Venice, New York, and Beirut, and held in collections such as Barjeel Art Foundation, Saradar Collection and Dalloul Art Foundation. In a world eager to erase, the artist carves a space for remembrance – in ash, dust, wax, and all things that are otherwise fleeting and fragile.