Conversation about Etel Adnan (FR)
26.05.2019, 15:00
With Sébastien Delot, Director LaM (musée de Villeneuve d’Ascq)
Free
Etel Adnan
Etel Adnan is one of those artists who speak so well about her work that it sometimes proves difficult not to quote her. Since the dOCUMENTA (13), the plastic oeuvre of Etel Adnan was rediscovered. Her committed texts and collection of poems have left their mark on the minds, leaving little place for her pictorial works. Ironically, today, her artistic work has taken over her literary work.
Her life is the long journey of the exiled – From Smyrna to Beirut, then from Paris to California – and her work is marked by these displacements. Elsewhere becomes a real and frictional territory: “Who are we, race, tribe, herd, an episode or a traveller that only travels to find who we are and who we will become? Do we walk on a tightrope, does cancer eat away at our neighbours, where does the sun go when night falls and where is paradise on the asphalt of oceanic roads? Who are we, men or women, is it temporary or eternal, is it true that there are men and women, it must be true since you are and since I am…”
This discussion will allow restoring the pictorial oeuvre of one of the pioneers of Arab modernity and the path of a humanist woman whose work touches us through its sincerity.
Sébastien Delot
Sébastien Delot, director and curator of the heritage at the LaM since 2017, doctor in history of contemporary art at Rennes 2 and Yale under the leadership of Mr Jean-Marc Poinsot and Mr Robert Storr has worked at the MAC/VAL, Abu Dhabi’s Louvre, at the MAMC+ in Saint-Etienne before joining the LaM. He also curated the following exhibitions: François Morellet et ses amis, Archéologie du présent, Etel Adnan at the Centre Paul Klee, Berne, Nicolas Schöffer at the LaM, Alberto Giacometti,…
Meeting organized by the CENTRALE as part of Brussels Art Summit, in partnership with BOZAR and WIELS.
In the frame of our exhibition Sophie Whettnall – Etel Adnan. La banquise, la forêt et les étoiles, from April 4th to August 4th 2019.
Sans titre, 2017 © Etel Adnan
Sébastien DELOT conservateur du LaM © Alexandre Traisnle / MEL
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