Chronicles from the Storm: Saher Nassar

In his latest exhibition, Saher Nassar reimagines events that push past emotional capacity toward moral exhaustion, questioning the ethical certainty of the human spirit when faced with immense suffering. The personal and collective events that defined the artist’s experience were translated through a variety of mediums.

The indelible impact of this prolonged experience has morphed into a “muse” for the artist, but for good reason. In a way, it equipped the artist with the perspective needed to temper an immediate reaction and give space to deeper engagement of his subject: Études of loss, the collapse of symbols, the formation of new convictions, and a newly forged intimacy with endurance, yet regrettably without epiphany, with nothing resolved in the end.

The artist’s narrative devices favor the protagonist through elevated image literacy, shaped by a child’s spiritual resilience and by the crescendos of a father’s composure, even when stripped of his fragility.

Across his body of work, the artist contemplates the devaluation of hope as a fundamental factor of human survival, sometimes revealed as currency for escape and at other times seen in people resorting to their mere primal instincts to endure.