Etel Adnan (1925–2021)

Praised by Hans Ulrich Obrist as “one of the most influential artists of the 21st century,” Paris and California-based Etel Adnan (1925-2021) has quietly worked in a variety of media, and across continents and languages, exploring themes of love and war. Her work is the opposite of cynicism,” writes Obrist. “It is pure oxygen in a world full of wars.”
Presenting the impressive diversity of Adnan’s work, The Weight of the World includes paintings, drawings, poetry, film, ceramics and tapestries. The catalogue’s title is taken from a new series of paintings completed for the show it accompanies at the Serpentine Gallery in London. It includes an essay by critic and writer Kaelen Wilson-Goldie that places Adnan’s art within the political and social context that has inspired it; a text by poet Robert Grenier; and writings by artist and publisher Simone Fattal on Adnan’s practice. This publication had 3 different covers,… (mere)

War/postcolonial poetry that combines a myriad of archetypal references with an intensely idiosyncratic engagement with language and with the nature of signs. It does retain some traces of more transparent political engagement (more specifically, Adnan seems to take an antifascist stance at times and does not always paint the horrors of war with a fairly broad stroke as a way of merely saying ”everybody hurts”), but a more straightforward poetry like that of socialist realism wouldn't have been faithful in recording the whole sense of violence, bloodshed, desperation, catastrophe that imbues everything, mutilating language itself.… (mere)

"Look at them! These four men set upon that passing bird...She was, they admit, a worthy prey...She was a woman, an independent woman, gone over to the enemy and mixing in politics, which is normally their personal hunting ground. They, the Chabab, had to bring women back to order, in this Orient, at once nomadic and immobile. On the Palestinian side, they dealt with crimes similarly. The stakes were different, but the methods were the same."

This novel takes place during the 1975 civil war in Lebanon. Marie Rose is the childhood friend of one of four Christian men who capture her when she ventures into her old Christian neighborhood. She now has a Palestinian partner, and lives in the camps and helps the refugees. The four men must decide whether to release her or kill her.

Each of the four men, and Marie Rose narrates a section of the novel. Is this a war of ethnicity, of religion, of the sexes, of the old ways versus the new ways? These questions are examined in prose that is lyrical and disturbing. This short book is worth a read.… (mere)