Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Floor 5

Born 1990 in Tyre, Lebanon
Lives in Beirut, Lebanon, and London, United Kingdom

In Adonis River, Dala Nasser creates a space of reflection that intermingles history and myth, past and present, mourning and the potential for collective mourning. Nasser has composed the site-specific sculpture as a row of columns, draped with a form of painting. She made charcoal rubbings of rocks by the Adonis Cave and Temple on bedsheets, which she then dyed with iron-rich clay from the banks of the Abraham River (formerly the Adonis River) on Mount Lebanon, north of Beirut.

The myth of Adonis first appears on Sumerian tablets describing mourning practices that commemorated the death of the fertility goddess’s mortal lover; the story evolved from ancient Sumerian and Assyrian cultures into the Greek myth of Aphrodite and Adonis. Nasser explores the ways that the Temple of Adonis has become important as a unifying site in Lebanon—a region with a long history of violence and conflict that continues to this day—and as a source for mythology and mourning rituals that forge a living continuity between past and present.