The Brooklyn Rail

Beneath the vaulted ceilings of the gallery, a ruin emerges from the ground to meet a shroud suspended above. From wood, mesh, clay and ash-stained cloth, curator Myriam Ben Salah has invited Dala Nasser to build an effigy of the Temple of Adonis, which is located in Lebanon. Myth says that the mortal Adonis was killed at that site, mauled by a wild boar dispatched by the god Ares out of jealousy for Aphrodite’s love for the human. Each spring, the mountain snowpack melts, feeding the Abraham River with iron-rich soil and turning it red as it flows from the mouth of the nearby cave. From the same soil, scarlet anemones bloom, said to be seeded from the blood of Adonis and watered by the tears of Aphrodite. A martyr for love, Adonis’s return in the form of blood-red waters and flowers affirms the profound connection between mortal man and the land.

The poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote that the land is a wound and a temple. Made of excavated stone, a temple stands inverse to the gouge created by this extraction. Although Nasser’s structure is made of more ephemeral matter, her fabrics were frotted with charcoal against the temple ruins and the rock of the cave. Dyed with its ruddy clay and washed in its river, their encrusted surfaces appear like the granite and sandstone from which their dust was lifted. Draped over a wooden frame built to resemble an outline of what remains of the stone structure, these fabrics become shrouds of mourning wrapped around the skeleton of a martyr. Closely, one can make out occasional boot-prints, traces of the artist’s labor expended in rubbing, dyeing, and washing the fabrics in the cave of Adonis and the ruins of his temple. It is said that the ritual mourning of Adonis culminated in the beating of breasts by women dressed in dark shrouds. In turn, Nasser presses her fabrics against the stones and soil as if to beat the breast of the land in an act of mourning, then hangs them as a shroud upon the flesh of the earth as it was built into a temple.

Nasser’s installation is surrounded by a four-channel arrangement of mourning prayers made in collaboration with artist Mhamad Safa, slowed down by a factor of forty and recorded on-site as it was played inside the cave and the temple where she worked. Shouts of anguish meld with the hum of traffic and other sonic debris, evoking the richly layered psychological space of collective mourning. To grieve for Adonis, who bled out on the land and imbued it with his spirit forever, is to grieve for the collective death of a promise for sovereignty for a people and their land.

The ruinous temple rests heavily upon the ground, while the ghostly shroud that floats above it represents the cave of Adonis. Standing precisely between them, the temple and the shroud appear to reach out to each other but do not meet. To contemplate this work is to long for the shroud of the cave to drift over and cover the body of the temple, to envelop it in a mourning embrace and dignify its death.