At the 2026 Venice Biennale, artists and writers converged connected Yto Barrada’s accumulation astatine the French Pavillion to wage tribute to Lebanese-American creator Etel Adnan. A stalwart polymath moving crossed poetry, prose, and ocular art, Adnan’s signifier featured themes of dispersal, indeterminacy and relation. Since her passing successful November 2021, astatine 96 years old, the reverberation of her work’s interaction has lone grown. There successful Venice, French manner decorator Michelle Lamy work an excerpt of Adnan’s book-length poem The Arab Apocalypse (1980), alongside poets Anne Waldman and Quinn Latimer, arsenic good arsenic MoMA’s Chief Curator of Media and Performance, Stuart Comer, who work from their contributions to My Center Is Not successful the Solar System: Tributes to Etel Adnan (My Center…), a caller anthology co-published by MACK and Bidoun.
Born successful Beirut, Lebanon, successful 1925, Adnan has go ubiquitous for her multihyphenate practice. Those acquainted with her ocular artistry volition admit her oil-painted fragments of Mount Tamalpais and the location she made successful Sausalito, California: abstractly color-blocked suns and mountains, wherever each shadiness sharply encounters another; each iteration bright, deliberate, and distinct. Her works person appeared successful Germany astatine documenta 13, the Arab Museum of Modern Art successful Qatar, the Whitney Biennial, and MoMA successful New York City, among others. In 2014, Adnan was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government and successful 2020, the twelvemonth earlier her death, she was awarded Canada’s astir prestigious poesy award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, for her publication Time. The postulation of poems, translated from French by Sarah Riggs, aptly sees Adnan contending with her ain mortality.
Adnan’s accolades not lone confer prestige, but besides representation the breadth of her swooping orbit. Early connected successful My Center…, Lebanese writer and translator, Dominique Eddé, describes her person of 50 years arsenic being calved “at a crossroads…the lone kid of a Syrian Turkish serviceman of the Ottoman Empire…and of a Greek pistillate who narrowly escaped Smyrna.” Here, Eddé takes banal of Adnan’s background, portion calling attraction to the forces progressive successful forming what would go her creator practice. An lone child, Adnan’s beingness and artistry were punctuated by the autumn of past empires and flights into exile. She grew up speaking Greek, Arabic, and Turkish, yet being educated successful English and French—even studying French Literature astatine the Sorbonne. In the 1960s portion teaching astatine California’s Dominican College, Adnan temporarily abandoned French successful protestation of France’s repression of the Algerian revolution. As a writer successful Lebanon for the Al-Safa newspaper, she would conscionable her life-partner, Simone Fattal, with whom she would co-found The Post-Apollo Press where she served arsenic a contributor and translator. She was, and continues to be, a moving composite image.
What could I bash with these gaps and markings, I thought, if I could not find their meaning? These moments of visceral intelligibility execute specified done an indeterminacy that, if I said Adnan wielded, I fishy she mightiness person disagreed with.
Reflecting connected the commemorative speechmaking astatine the Biennale, My Center… co-editor and Bidoun Editor-in-Chief Negar Azimi tells maine that being “at a large planetary creation lawsuit successful the midst of transgression wars of aggression progressive a just magnitude of cognitive dissonance, truthful it felt close to stitchery with [Adnan’s] words arsenic our guide.” Like the reading, this anthology finds its signifier done Adnan’s life, pulling her devotees into a chorus of voices. Featuring caller archetypal enactment from Aria Aber, Isabella Hammad, Omar Berrada, Eileen Myles, Ariana Reines and others who mention Adnan arsenic a lodestar, My Center… is simply a testament to this poet’s gravity. The entries see poems written with Adnan successful mind, diaristic recollections of however they archetypal encountered her, and adjacent idiosyncratic correspondence with the artist. When asked astir the specificity that went into selecting contributors, Azimi tells maine they approached radical who were adjacent to Adnan, “fellow travelers arsenic it were,” similar the historiographer Fawwaz Traboulsi, portion besides showcasing “a caller procreation of her interpreters and admirers.”
Multitudinous successful signifier similar the creator it commemorates, the substance besides features ne'er earlier seen sketches by Adnan. Particular successful their appearance, they are not the brightly colored canvases that she has travel to beryllium associated with, says Azimi, “but alternatively thing much intimate, idiosyncratic and surprising. Something person to the word.” It was this intimate, idiosyncrasy that intimidated maine erstwhile I archetypal encountered The Arab Apocalypse, its “litany of colour and fearfulness delineating the demolition of Beirut,” successful the words of contributor Quinn Latimer. Being a younger poet, I was resistant to the enactment and struggled against its “war successful the vacant sky,” its unheeded prayers and proliferating multi-colored suns. What could I bash with these gaps and markings, I thought, if I could not find their meaning? These moments of visceral intelligibility execute specified done an indeterminacy that, if I said Adnan wielded, I fishy she mightiness person disagreed with. She mightiness person asserted that indeterminacy is an un-fixedness that 1 surrenders to. So erstwhile I understood myself arsenic being opposed to the poem, truly I was experiencing the onslaught of questions that had apt brought Adnan to some leafage and canvas. Not simply an enquiry of what is happening, oregon how we unrecorded successful the midst of it, but what we mightiness bash with the stultifying inventory of empire’s regular violences successful the world.
This questioning was besides astatine enactment successful the relationships she formed with different artists. “Anytime determination was thing going connected successful the satellite that I was contending with, I would constitute to her and she would ever person a precise clear, but simultaneously surprising, position connected what that happening was,” Japanese-American writer Brandon Shimoda tells maine implicit Zoom. In fact, I had archetypal encountered Adnan’s enactment erstwhile Shimoda posted fragmented missives shared betwixt the 2 writers connected societal media. “I wrote her a emotion letter,” helium tells me, recalling their gathering for the archetypal clip successful Lebanon successful 2009. Within astir a week of that, Adnan had responded via email, and truthful began their storied correspondence. “Dear Brandon,” she writes successful 1 email, “we are betwixt outpouring and thing else, a play with nary name…when oregon wherever abruptly things gel and marque consciousness and the connection quality is applicable.” Who talks similar this, I would inquire myself, awestruck by her confounding and elucidating responses. When I jokingly inquire Shimoda this aforesaid question helium offers that she was “the closest approximation of a quality being simultaneously a homo-sapien and an element” due to the fact that of what she wrote, however she wrote, and however she was.
My Center… houses assorted transmissions from Adnan. Lebanese historiographer Fawwaz Traboulsi, translated from Arabic by Yasmine Seale, offers a sojourn to Etel successful Paris conscionable 1 week earlier she passed. Asking to beryllium recorded astir instantly arsenic Traboulsi arrives, we perceive Adnan statement with Nietzsche and punctuation the Sufis. With filmmaker Lamia Joreige, Etel revisits the play of a person she chased to America successful 1955. Adnan and Swiss curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist, sermon the worth of epiphany and spontaneity successful poetry, arsenic good arsenic representation successful narration to architecture. To American writer Anne Waldman, Adnan writes “Believe me, the happening that means astir truly astir is love—passion emotion oregon friendship, the getting unneurotic of a fewer radical a fewer times for a fewer hours—and it does marque of surviving a fantastic thing.” Each transcribed voice-recording, interview, and missive provides a antithetic model into what it was similar to beryllium successful adjacent proximity to specified a singular thinker.
But transmissions tin beryllium felt acold beyond their constituent of origin. Poet and novelist Aria Aber, who knew of Adnan’s value to different poets she admired, developed an “obsession” with The Arab Apocalypse in 2019. Then successful 2020, during the pandemic, she would walk hours staring astatine the integer versions of Adnan’s paintings. For Aber, the works offered “a consciousness of location oregon bounty erstwhile everything other was suffused with decease and grief.” Aber’s offering to the bounty of this substance reads with traces of Adnan’s chiseled mysticism; that aforesaid peripheral clarity I person recovered successful poets similar Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant. Her talker desires to “go beyond” their life, to “abdicate that different coast, and spot the self/ disintegrate, oregon shimmer.” In that lyricism is an alternate totality that Adnan lived, hinted by the entirety of the punctuation from which the publication takes its title.
Aber notes however Adnan’s rejection of centrality is absorbing due to the fact that she “is a guiding light” and an undeniable portion of her “literary and spiritual cosmology.” For Brandon Shimoda, the title’s contradiction is an look of a thought process and impervious of Adnan’s changeless changing, while, for Negar Azimi, the rubric speaks to the ways successful which Adnan was an “itinerant psyche hailing from different planet, successful much ways than one.”
Opening My Center… to its aboriginal pages, Etel Adnan speaks again. She looks straight astatine america and whispers, “If you conscionable maine successful the street, don’t beryllium definite it is me,” with each the sincerity and information of a trickster. Don’t beryllium definite uttered by this substance suggests a antithetic mode of looking, arsenic overmuch arsenic it suggests a antithetic benignant of being. It is our philosopher-poet playing successful opacity, tricking america into recognition—into the accidental that we mightiness spot ourselves successful these pages, amidst her beloved friends. At this seventy-two paged book’s nonstop halfway is simply a cosmic exchange. Her drawings, with their agelong limbs reaching, archer us:
I Am Yesterday and Today and Tomorrow / said The Sun
And I americium You / said The Moon
She is bringing america to the crossroads, opening again. She is saying I miss you.
English (US) ·