Nasri Sayegh is a French-Lebanese writer, visual artist, actor, and DJ (creator of radiokarantina) born in Lebanon in 1978.
His body of work – mixing photography, collage, and cross-stich embroidery – is blurred, fuzzy, and furtive; running the risk of suddenly being erased at any time. Drawing from his personal visual archive(s), Nasri Sayegh alters and deconstructs the image to better reconstruct his own historiography. Through an archaeological/archetypal excavation, he revisits the threads of his intimate narratives according to mnemonic impulses. Cuts and dissection in the body of the image and cross-referencing of visual data become pretexts for inventing/digging/mounting new layers of images and words. In all its forms, the image becomes a glitch in space and a negative of the artist’s portrait. It behaves as a notebook-image that serves as pretext for the written language.
Where No One Else Can See
Based on a photo from the 80s showing a little boy in drag as a movie starlet (the image below the artist's profile photo), Where No One Else Can See is a scriptural and visual expedition through the real-life archives of a man in search of his origins. Would the latter be located in the recesses of the said image suddenly resurfacing from the past, in the folds of this frail blue tulle dress, or at the commissure of the boy's lips? Through both the intimate and collective archive, collage, and cutting with scissors or by a comma, Where No One Else Can See is a prologue and extension of images, an intimate palimpsest, and a pretext for words in progress and/or to come.