The Arab World Institute is organizing the first solo exhibition in France of the great Lebanese artist Etel Adnan, a figure of feminism and the Peace Movement, author from the 1970s of a body of work in which literary and visual creation merge.
Etel Adnan is a poet, painter, essayist and trilingual writer (English, French, Arabic). She has lived in France for many years. The exhibition is divided into four main sections, which explore all facets of her work.
The Arabic-Typescript Apocalypse
A look back at the life and work of Etel Adnan, and the key moments that marked them. This section highlights one of her founding texts, The Arab Apocalypse (1980), underlining the importance of the written language in her work and her political commitment. The broadcast of the text, read in French, English and Arabic, immerses the visitor in a multilingual sound atmosphere.
Mount Tamalpai
An evocation of Etel Adnan's connection to the American West Coast and the underground scene of San Francisco. This section illustrates the importance of her pictorial work, between abstraction and figuration. Drawings, paintings and one of her famous leporellos, accordion notebooks filled with texts and drawings, underline the major place that Mount Tamalpai occupies in it. Located in California, it is the artist's true "Montagne Sainte-Victoire".
Bridges, exiles
Etel Adnan's artistic production bears the influence of her many travels and places of residence. This is evidenced by the drawings on the theme of bridges, the leporellos representing Beirut, New York and Paris, or the film shot in 1982 from a window in New York.
ink on Japanese paper, 94.5 × 62 cm
A world of colours and sounds
Etel Adnan discovered tapestry in the 1960s, in Wissa Wassef's Cairo workshop. Her tapestry work is presented through several pieces made by her hand, but also drawings, paintings and leporellos.
Photo: Thierry Rambaud. Courtesy Institut du Monde Arabe