le monde n’est pas nécessairement un empire

On the occasion of the acquisition of an exceptional set of works by Etel Adnan, together with a gift from the artist, the museum will present contemporary Lebanese creation this autumn by inviting sculptor Simone Fattal as well as artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (invited teachers at Fresnoy in 2012) to exhibit alongside him.

Among the most important artists of Arab modernity, Etel Adnan (born in 1925 in Beirut) was first recognized as a poet.
A painter since the 1960s, her participation in Documenta 13 in 2012 made her known to the general public. Each Etel Adnan painting is a small equilibrium miracle. “All art is a window open to a world to which only he has access. These worlds are indefinable. They are epiphanies, visions.

Simone Fattal, a sculptor, learned about ceramics at the Art Institute in San Francisco in the late 1980s. In 2006, she went to the studio of the German ceramist Hans Spinner in Grasse. large, reminding, for some, the mythology of ancient Mesopotamia. His works will be put in dialogue with that of Etel Adnan.

The film Ismyrne , directed by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, will return to the importance of history in the work of Etel Adnan. Through a long conversation between the artist and Joana Hadjithomas, the two women’s childhoods, their family histories, memory, memory, relationship to the image and the upheavals experienced by Near East since the end of the Ottoman Empire.