Brings together two of Nasser’s most ambitious recent projects: Adonis River and Xíloma. MCCCLXXXV.

Dala Nasser often works through abstraction and alternative forms of image-making, and yet she is quintessentially a painter: an artist who always thinks through this medium and its most elementary materials, including fabric, pigments, stretcher bars, and color. Her indexical paintings of land—made through direct contact at specific locations—stand in opposition to the sweeping vistas of traditional landscape painting. Instead, Nasser proposes an entirely different approach to bearing witness to the political, environmental, and historical conditions of place, and to their lasting cultural presence in myth. This book brings together two of Nasser’s most ambitious recent projects: Adonis River at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2023) and Xíloma. MCCCLXXXVI at Kunsthalle Basel (2025), in Basel, Switzerland. Though made under different circumstances, both treat land, material, and architecture as active agents rather than passive backdrops. 

Adonis River, Nasser’s first US exhibition, emerged from sustained work in southern Lebanon, centering on Nahr Ibrahim (the Abraham River), which is known in myth as the place where Adonis, mortal lover of Aphrodite, was killed by a wild boar. The fabric rubbings of the rocks and cave floors she made on site, dyed them with local clay and ash, later became the material of an installation at the Renaissance Society that evoked both Adonis’s temple and the cave where it is said to have died. Xíloma. MCCCLXXXVI, commissioned by Kunsthalle Basel, arose from constraint rather than such direct access. The Church of Saint Christopher in southern Lebanon remains inaccessible due to ongoing war,  but the mosaic floor of this sixth-century church was excavated in the nineteenth century by colonial mandate and taken to the Louvre. The work’s title, MCCCLXXXVI, references the 1,386 years the mosaic remained embedded in its homeland. For this exhibition, Nasser created cyanotypes of the mosaic floor and recreated a semblance of the former church within the museum’s gallery space. 

Nasser’s projects are grounded in specific landscapes and histories, yet meaning emerges through gradual accumulation rather than overt explanation. This catalog reflects that sensibility. Two essays—one by Molly Hartung-Zuckerman and one by Nabil Harb—engage Nasser’s practice from distinct critical but also deeply personal perspectives. Two conversations—one recorded between Nasser and Kaeleen Wilson-Goldie at Kunsthalle Basel, another with W. J. T. Mitchell transcribed from a talk at the Renaissance Society—open the work through dialogue. Across Adonis River and Xíloma. MCCCLXXXVI, what comes into view is an artist’s practice attentive to where things happen, how histories move, what remains after removal, and how long any of this takes to register.