06/01/2026
Nasri Sayegh (b. 1978, Lebanon) is a Lebanese-French visual artist, writer, actor, and DJ, and the founder of radiokarantina. His practice - spanning photography, collage, and cross-stitch embroidery - engages with the transient, the blurred, and the unstable, where images hover on the verge of disappearance. First initiated in 1986 and sustained over time, embroidery has become a core thread of his artistic practice. Drawing from his personal visual archives, Sayegh dismantles and reconfigures images to construct a subjective historiography. Through processes of excavation and cross-referencing, fragmentation generates new strata of images and text, where the image functions both as a visual notebook and as a catalyst for writing.
Conceived as a new work, Of Mice and Wars (1986 / 2025) gives homage and space to Nasri Sayegh’s eight-year-old self. It is said that the un-civil wars began in 1975; he was born three years later. His first embroidery appeared in 1986: a small mouse, stitched by hand. In 1982, during the invasion of Lebanon, balloons shaped like Mickey Mouse were released - some rigged with toxins, disguised as toys. He continued to embroider through time, not to embellish but to make sense of what surrounded him, to mend what war had undone. Memory, language, and childhood converge here: embroidery becomes a gesture of repair, a way of addressing what was lost. It is said that the fires have ceased, yet the threads continue to guide that little boy’s hands.
