Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives Chapter 2: Etel Adnan
The world needs togetherness, not separation. Love, not suspicion. A common future, not isolation.
Etel Adnan
Simone Fattal

02.07.2022—29.05.2023
Co-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Senior Advisor), Arthur Fouray (Archivist and Curator)
With the assistance of Lucas Jacques-Witz (Assistant Curator and Archivist), Victoria Kloch (Living Archives intern)

LUMA Arles
Living Archives Programme
Arles, France
https://www.luma.org/en/arles/our-program/event/archives-de-hans-ulrich-obrist-etel-adnan

Photographs: Joana Luz, Arthur Fouray (editing)

‘The world needs
togetherness, not
separation. Love,
not suspicion.
A common future,
not isolation.’
Etel Adnan, June 2016

‘Ever Etel
Ever Adnan’
Hans Ulrich Obrist, February 2021

A leporello exhibited in Dubai in 2007 catalysed Hans Ulrich Obrist’s long-term collaboration and friendship with the late Etel Adnan, one of the greatest poets and artists of our time. Obrist was magnetically drawn to the cosmic energy of her work and he read and archived every publication he found. The first he read was Sitt Marie Rose (The Post-Apollo Press, 1977), her magnum opus on the Lebanese Civil War, which established Adnan as a significant political writer and one of the preeminent voices of feminist and peace movements.

Seeing her work then evoked in Obrist a similar feeling to discovering Paul Klee’s work as a teenager. Like Klee, Adnan was a polymath. Her practice could be linked to the superstring theory; a Gesamtkunstwerk that has many dimensions and expands the notion of single disciplines: cartographies, drawings, films, notebooks, novels, paintings, plays, poems, political journalism, sculptures, tapestries, and teaching.

Born in Beirut in 1925, Adnan studied at Sorbonne and Harvard, after which she taught philosophy at the University and started painting in the late 1950s in California. There, she fell in love with her life partner Simone Fattal as well as a mountain, Mount Tamalpais, at the foot of which they lived. Her passion led to numerous paintings and the book Journey to Mount Tamalpais (The Post-Apollo Press, 1986). Often stemming from a red square shape, her canvases are abstract compositions with flat colours directly applied from the tubes. She was interested in the immediate beauty of colour. As Simone Fattal explains, her paintings both ‘exude energy and give energy. They grow on you like talismans.’

Her unrealised project of becoming an architect can be compared to how she approached painting as something that is built. Adnan understood painting as addressing itself to the outside world and architecture as inescapable, something that is always already there and made for us to be. As she said, ‘The first architecture for a human being is their mother’s womb.’

It was under heavy rain, during the winter of 2012, that Etel Adnan, Simone Fattal, Koo Jeong A, and Hans Ulrich Obrist found refuge in a café in Brittany. Throughout long conversations, Adnan was writing poems on a notepad. It became evident to Obrist that it was important to celebrate handwriting as opposed to the lamentation of its disappearing. Since then, he shares the handwritten notes of the people he meets on Instagram once a day.

After a first chapter dedicated to Édouard Glissant, the second chapter of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s archive focuses on the myriad of conversations held with Etel Adnan from 2009 until her last days in 2021, comprising fifteen hours of unreleased interviews, tracing their relation through hundreds of published documents, Post-it notes, handwritten correspondences, and artworks. Their connection was one of mutual respect and, above all, wholehearted admiration. They shared numberless projects; she was a regular participant of the Marathon conversations, organised yearly by Obrist at the Serpentine, London; he has also devoted two major solo exhibitions to her practice and published multiple monographs about her work. Adnan is an essential figure for LUMA Arles, a project Hans Ulrich Obrist has accompanied since its inception. Maja Hoffmann, founder of LUMA, remembers: ‘Etel once told me, what we are doing with LUMA is creating a lighthouse for the Mediterranean. If LUMA is the lighthouse, then Etel is certainly the fire, the fire that lights up the space and shows directions.’

Acknowledgements

Hans Ulrich Obrist would like to thank Maja Hoffmann for her vision and passion for the archives; Mustapha Bouhayati, Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Matthieu Humery and all the LUMA team; Arthur Fouray, who organised and co-curated the Etel Adnan archives project with Lucas Jacques-Witz and the help of Victoria Kloch; Luz Gyalui and the production team, in particular Clément Château and Barbara Blanc; all the teams who made this project possible, in particular Claire Charrier; last but not least Anna von Brühl and Friedrich von Brühl. Hans Ulrich Obrist wishes to express its gratitude to Simone Fattal and the relatives of Etel Adnan; and also all those who participated in the preparation of this project; Manuel Krebs and Dimitri Bruni and the NORM team, Max Shackleton, Producer and Lorraine Two Testro, Head of Operations and Planning to Hans Ulrich Obrist; the Serpentine team, especially Claude Adjil, Rose Dempsey, Fiona Glen, Kostas Stasinopoulos; Joe Hage and the Heni team, especially Mary Zantiris, Hervé Chandès, Pierre-Édouard Couton and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain team, John McGrath, Kwong Lee and the Manchester Internation Festival team, Samuel Thomas for the editing of the archive videos; the Sintagma team, especially Rosário Valadas Vieira et Ana Gonçalves, for the subtitling of the archive videos; Jesus Plaëttner, for the mastering and audio restauration of the archive videos; the IDzia team for the audio-visual devices; Gilles Pennegaggi and all the exhibition installation teams; and finally, to all the people who participated in the elaboration of the presentation, especially Koo Jeong A, Chiara Parisi and Manuella Vaney.

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