DALA NASSER

Early years and background

Dala Nasser was born in Tyre, Lebanon, and lives and works in Beirut, where her family has long maintained a farm in the country’s south. She studied in the United States (MFA Painting, Yale School of Art, Yale University) and United Kingdom (BFA Fine Arts, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL; Foundation Diploma in Fine Arts, Central Saint Martins University of Art and Design)before developing an interdisciplinary practice between Beirut and London that remains rooted in the landscapes, histories, and mythologies of Lebanon.

Dala Nasser artworks

Dala Nasser’s practice spans painting, installation, performance, film, and sound, while remaining anchored in the fundamentals of painting—fabric, pigment, stretcher bars, and line. Working through abstraction and alternative forms of image-making, Nasser treats materials as witnesses to environmental degradation, colonial extraction, and slow violence, often using indexical processes that bring fabric into direct contact with specific sites.

Material as witness

Nasser frequently works with unprimed fabrics, tablecloths, and bedsheets that she stains, soaks, buries, dyes, and rubs with soil, ash, clay, charcoal, plants, insects, and other substances gathered from the environments she studies. These procedures produce dense, sedimented surfaces that register the physical touch of landscapes and architectures—from archaeological sites to places marked by war—so that the work functions as an index of ecological and historical conditions rather than a depictive image.

Landscape, mourning, and slow violence

Nasser’s ‘indexical paintings of land’ often focus on Beirut and South Lebanon, creating close-up views that counter the distant vistas of conventional landscape painting. Across projects, she engages with mourning rituals, infrastructural collapse, and the afterlives of colonialism, sometimes incorporating sound, performance, and processional forms that extend her canvases into three-dimensional, architectural arrangements.

Adonis River and major installations

The installation Adonis River (2023), first exhibited at the Renaissance Society in Chicago and later included in the Whitney Biennial 2024, centres on the Adonis River (Nahr Ibrahim) in Mount Lebanon, intertwining myth, landscape, and contemporary political histories. Comprising large dyed and rubbed fabrics—made with charcoal rubbings from Adonis Cave and Temple and pigments such as ash, iron oxide clay from Mount Lebanon, indigo, and walnut shell—arranged on wooden supports and accompanied by a four-channel sound piece of slowed mourning prayers, the work stages material as a carrier of memory and collective grief.

Select awards and accolades

• Inclusion in Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
• Participation in the 58th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
• Participation in Sharjah Biennial 15, Sharjah Art Foundation
• Selection for Aichi Triennale 2025, Aichi Triennale, Nagoya

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Dala Nasser exhibitions

Dala Nasser has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions at leading institutions and biennials in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the United States.

Select solo exhibitions

• 2025: Xíloma. MCCCLXXXVI, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland
• 2023: Adonis River, Renaissance Society, Chicago, USA
• 2022: Your flesh as my greatest poem, Antenna Space, Shanghai, China
• 2021: By Any Means, VO Curations, London, UK

Select group and biennial exhibitions

• 2025: Aichi Triennale 2025: A Time Between Ashes and Roses, Aichi Triennale, Nagoya, Japan
• 2025: Arte Povera: A New Chapter, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland
• 2024: Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA
• 2024: Diriyah Biennale 2024: After Rain, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
• 2023: Thinking Historically in the Present, Sharjah Biennial 15, Sharjah, UAE
• 2022: 58th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA
• 2021: The Dead Shall be Raised, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

More reading

Dala Nasser’s practice has been discussed in leading contemporary art publications and institutional texts, including essays by Frieze, Mousse Magazine, and Hartwig Art Foundation, alongside catalogues and exhibition materials from the Renaissance Society, Kunsthalle Basel, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. You can read more about the artist and follow new coverage via her Ocula profile and Ocula Magazine.

Dala Nasser FAQs

Ocula | 2026