Draft:Dala Nasser

 Dala Nasser دالا ناصر  (b.1990, Tyre, Lebanon) is a contemporary artist working through painting, sculpture, and film. Her large-scale installations, made using direct material contact on location, provide close-up views of the markings of historical and environmental conditions.

Her work has been featured in the 2022 Carnegie International, 2023 Sharjah Biennial, 2024 Diriyah Biennial, 2024 Whitney Biennial, and 2024 Painting Biennial, as well as institutional solo exhibitions at the Renaissance Society, and Kölnischer Kunstverein her work has been collected by major institutions.

Early life and education
Born in Tyre, Lebanon Dala Nasser attended Slade School of Fine Art for her BFA in Painting and received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in 2021. She is the niece of playwright and theatre director Siham Nasser. She received the Sursock Museum's 33rd Salon d'Automne's emerging artist prize in 2017.

Career and artwork
Dala Nasser incorporates sound, performance and film in her practice, but remains strictly a painter as she thinks through this medium and its materials: fabric, pigments, stretcher bars, lines, drawing. She considers materials as witnesses, and has developed a growing body of work that foregrounds unknown histories, ecologies of slow violence, colonial theft, and infrastructural failure in times and places where human language has been rendered insufficient or out of reach.

In the 2022 Carnegie International she rebuilt Hiram's Tomb using stretcher bars, and canvas marked with charcoal rubbings of the limestone structure and dyed with its surrounding shrubbery. For her first US institutional solo show in 2023 at the Renaissance Society she rebuilt the cave and Temple of Adonis using fabrics dyed with iron oxide rich clay from the banks of the Abraham River. Exploring themes of mourning and the potential for collective organizing, this installation was then featured in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. She is one of the 4 commissioned artists for the 2025 Aichi Triennial in Nagoya Japan.

Major works

 * Adonis River (2023).
 * The Tomb of King Hiram (2022).
 * Red in Tooth (2021).