Words and Places: Etel Adnan

Description

Please join us the evening of April 17th to celebrate the opening of Words and Places: Etel Adnan. The opening reception will include readings by the poets Norma Cole and Joanne Kyger.

Featuring works by Etel Adnan, Chris Marker, Rabih Mroué, and the Otolith Group, with selected articles from the Al-Safa newspaper archive.

Words and Places: Etel Adnan is an exhibition produced by the graduating class of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts with the support of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts.

Words and Places: Etel Adnan is the first large-scale institutional exhibition of work by the Lebanese writer, poet, and painter Etel Adnan, spanning six decades of her artistic practice. Born in Beirut in 1925 to a Christian Greek mother and a Muslim Syrian father, Adnan has spent her life between places—Beirut, Paris, and the Bay Area—negotiating their different cultures and languages, as well as her distinctive position among them. This experience of displacement deeply informs her work, which similarly ranges between mediums and formats. The exhibition explores Adnanʼs complex negotiation between verbal and visual forms of expression. For example, Adnanʼs leporellos, or folding books, offer a compelling fusion of written texts and painted or drawn images. Their unique design is intended to accommodate narrative, and they connect the immediacy of her gestural paintings with the extended durations of her writings.

A schedule of accompanying public programs will include poetry readings, workshops, film screenings, and lectures, each intended to promote dialogue between Adnanʼs practice and the Bay Areaʼs poetry, writing, film, and art communities. Screenings of films by Rania Stephan and Simone Fattal will engage issues of place and female identity in the Middle East. By animating and enriching the exhibition concepts, the programming series will actively address the exhibitionʼs ties to its specific place and time while also responding to relevant international concerns. For a schedule of these programs and more information about the exhibition, please visit the Wattis website.

Words and Places: Etel Adnan will be on view at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts from April 17th through June 29th.

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http://www.wattis.org

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415.355.9671

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