Lara Nasser
“Faith Faith Faith Faith Bang Bang”
New York, 11 East 80th Street
Lara Nasser’s second exhibition at Meredith Rosen continues to humor and confuse the viewer with cryptic tales from a queer Lebanese woman in America that confront a universal in-betweenness at the heart of contemporary culture. A spectacle of art show and peep show, Faith Faith Faith Faith Bang Bang takes you on an uncanny carpet ride through the Occident and Orient. Straddling a space between corporate waiting room and Muslim funeral salon, the show presents a revenge-appropriation of uncertain intentionality. Through an immersive installation, interactive video and a new series of paintings, Nasser depicts oiled-up bros, demure housewives, holy hot dogs, and meditating business folk posed in scenes that are as unsettling as they are playful. Glamorous and uneasy, the works celebrate their own fictitious obsolescence, nostalgic for a time that never existed. Emulsifying the minimal with the tacky, the kinky with the conservative, Nasser’s work reeks of an escapist lust for beauty in a place of conflict. But beneath this glossy veneer lies a sneering rejection of contemporary political narratives.
Nasser, Lara, Betabase, 2020, oil on canvas, 53 x 50
Nasser picks apart not-so-post-colonial stereotypes that have usurped the Arab identity, reducing it to a set of generalizations bound to failure, fundamentalism, and warfare. Her critique culminates in the interactive HD 24P Historical Desert Arabian Adventure Film, less a video piece than a recursive television micro-universe. Six interrelated TV channels play in sync, telling the same story across simultaneous realities. A remote control is provided to cycle through them. The piece centers around The Holy Colonel, a mischievous drag king (performed by Nasser) roaming around mid-revolution Lebanon as both messiah and mascot. Spells are cast and bribes are made on an epic expedition. As he hides in plain sight amidst the coinciding channels, narratives are blurred in a sea of myth and propaganda. The installation was inspired by the torching of the same KFC in Northern Lebanon on two separate occasions, largely in response to American foreign policy. By highlighting American cultural export as a colonizing force, it addresses the bilateral scale of desire and fear between East and West — fetish and consumption at best, prejudice and destruction at worst. The powerlessness of the viewer’s semi-participation echoes Nasser’s experience living in the West, watching disasters at home unfold in real time from a screen.
Nasser, Lara, Salma, 2020, oil on panel, 10 x 8
Faith Faith Faith Faith Bang Bang opens at a moment in history when imperial rhetoric is being challenged and upheaved. As Nasser created this exhibition the revolution in Lebanon has continued, the global pandemic closed down the world and there was a cataclysmic blast that destroyed the historic capital Beirut. The world has become a reflection of this work more than the other way around, and as the channels in place communicate in a closed loop, we are left with the most impotent of all weapons: the remote.
