ADONIS RIVER

DALA NASSER SOLO EXHIBITION

THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY | CHICAGO, IL USA 2023

INSTALLATION DESIGN FOR DALA NASSER’s Solo Exhibition AT THE Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.

For Dala Nasser’s Adonis River at The Renaissance Society in Chicago, we were invited to develop the spatial language of an installation that mourns and memorializes a landscape shaped by mythology, extraction, and environmental violence. Housed in the Renaissance Society’s singular loft-like gallery, with its pitched ceiling and historic bay windows, the exhibition demanded a response that was both monumental and precise.

We conceived a tripartite structure—a fragmented yet unified temple—rooted in the geometry and symbolism of ancient sacred architecture. Referencing the temple of Adonis in Afqa, Lebanon, the installation evokes a ruin reassembled: columns stand draped in painted textile works; a pediment becomes a cave; and foundational blocks pixelate and dissolve as if mid-disintegration. Together, these elements form a suspended monument—hovering in tension between collapse and resurrection.

The architectural composition is tailored to the idiosyncrasies of the space: its heights, its movement, its frames of light. Visitors enter head-on, confronting the monument as if approaching a sacred site, while a haunting soundscape permeates the room. The result is an immersive spatial encounter that blurs myth, architecture, and memory—inviting mourning not only for what is lost, but for what is still vanishing.

Following its debut in Chicago, Adonis River was adapted and reinstalled at the Whitney Biennial in New York—an institutionally significant gesture that speaks to the work’s resonance across geographies, and to its ability to inhabit vastly different spatial and curatorial contexts while retaining its formal and emotional gravity.