There are artists whose works you love from afar. And then there are artists you absolutely want to meet in person – because their paintings are so touching, their words so profound and their stories so impressive. Etel Adnan, who was born in Beirut in 1925, is one of them. Though she passed away in 2021, you can still feel close to her and her work at Kindl: the art center is dedicating an exhibition to her, presenting her work in interplay with that of her life partner Simone Fattal. The show “Voices without borders” is designed as a dialogue between the two women: a conversation that focuses not only on their experiences as artists in the Arab world, but more importantly on who they are as people. What connected them was language. Fattal, a ceramist born in Damascus in 1942, worked as a publisher, while Adnan, the grandiose painter and filmmaker, also wrote. After many years in California, Adnan returned to Lebanon in the seventies to work as a journalist for French newspapers. Here she met Fattal, twenty years her junior. The two become a couple, but with the start of the civil war they had to flee. In Paris, Adnan began translating her lived experiences into both a novel and poems, which Fattal published. Later, Adnan discovered leporellos for herself and, inspired by the Arabic tradition of calligraphy, slowly moved away from writing to signs. She transposed her luminous formal landscapes onto paper – but also onto canvas and tapestry. One recognizes basic natural forms in Adnan’s abstract paintings. There are mountains, clouds and suns, observed and experienced between California and France. These are the same forms that one finds in Fattal’s sculptural work. Thus, “Voices without borders” not only opens up spaces that are decidedly feminist and queer. It is an exhibition that tells – of life, of love and connection between two people.
Text: Laura Storfner / Credits: Simone Fattal, The Estate of Etel Adnan / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2023; Photo: Jens Ziehe
KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Am Sudhaus 3, 12053 Berlin-Neukölln; map
Etel Adnan & Simone Fattal: Voices without borders, until 01.01.2024
Wed 12–20h, Thu–Sun 12–18h
@kindlberlin
