Dala Nasser

Adonis River, 2023, the most recent installation by Lebanese artist Dala Nasser, is both an elegy to a mythical past and a monument to the losses (human, ecological, and otherwise) that plague our precarious present. Navigated from multiple points of entry, Nasser’s site-specific environment offered a refuge for pause and intuitive looking while responding to the interior architecture of the Renaissance Society’s somewhat ecclesiastical space, with its high-vaulted ceiling and clerestory windows that fill the gallery with radiant streams of light. By combining classical vertical forms that reference Doric columns and towering wooden constructions layered with earthen-dyed fabrics, the artist explored the intersections between history and materiality as rich metaphors for current geopolitical conflicts, particularly those related to lineages of water and land.