At the 2026 Venice Biennale, artists and writers gathered at Yto Barrada’s exhibition in the French Pavilion to pay tribute to Lebanese-American artist Atel Adnan. A veteran polymath working across poetry, prose and visual arts, Adnan’s practice included themes of dispersion, uncertainty and connection. Since his death in November 2021 at the age of 96, the impact of his work has only grown louder. There in Venice, French fashion designer Michel Lamy read an excerpt from Adnan’s book-length poem arab apocalypse (1980), along with poets Anne Waldman and Quinn Latimer, as well as MoMA’s chief curator of media and performance, Stuart Comer, who read their contributions My center is not in the solar system: Tribute to Etel Adnan (My center…)A new compilation co-published by Mac and Bidoun.
Born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925, Adnan has become ubiquitous for his multihyphenate practice. Those familiar with his visual artistry will recognize his oil-painted pieces of Mount Tamalpais and the house he built in Sausalito, California: abstractly color-blocked suns and mountains, where each shadow sharply encounters the other; Each iteration is bright, well-thought-out and distinctive. His works have been exhibited at Documenta 13 in Germany, the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, the Whitney Biennial, and MoMA in New York City, among others. In 2014, Adnan was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and in 2020, a year before his death, he was awarded Canada’s most prestigious poetry prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his book. Time. The collection of poems, translated from the French by Sarah Riggs, sees Adnan grappling with his mortality.
Adnan’s accolades not only confer prestige, but also reflect the breadth of his dizzying orbit. in the beginning My center…The Lebanese writer and translator, Dominique Ade, describes her friend of fifty years, who was “born at a crossroads…the only child of a Syrian Turkish officer of the Ottoman Empire…and a Greek woman who had narrowly escaped Smyrna.” Here, Ade takes stock of Adnan’s background, as well as the forces at work in shaping his artistic practice. An only child, Adnan’s life and artistry were influenced by the decline of ancient empires and flight into exile. She grew up speaking Greek, Arabic, and Turkish, eventually receiving an education in English and French – even studying French literature at the Sorbonne. While teaching at the Dominican College of California in the 1960s, Adnan temporarily abandoned the French language in protest against France’s repression of the Algerian Revolution. While a journalist in Lebanon for Al-Safa newspaper, she would meet her life partner, Simone Fattal, with whom she co-founded Post-Apollo Press Where he worked as a contributor and translator. She was and will always be a moving picture.
I thought, what could I do with these gaps and marks if I couldn’t determine them Meaning? These moments of gut wisdom are achieved through an uncertainty like this, if I told Adnan wieldedI doubt she would have disagreed with this.
Considering the memorial reading in the biennium, my center… Negar Azimi, co-editor and editor-in-chief of Bidoun, told me that “There was a great deal of cognitive dissonance involved in putting on a large international arts event in the midst of criminal wars of aggression, so it felt right to gather with (Adnan’s) words as our guide.” Like the reading itself, the anthology finds its form through Adnan’s life, drawing his devotees into the chorus of voices. Featuring new original work from Aria Aber, Isabella Hammad, Omar Berada, Eileen Miles, Ariana Raines and others, who cite Adnan as a lodestar, My center… This is proof of the seriousness of this poet. Entries include poems written with Adnan in mind, diaristic memories of how they first met him, and even personal correspondence with the artist. Asked about the specifics of choosing contributors, Azimi told me that he approached people who were close to Adnan, “who were fellow travelers,” such as historian Fawaz Traboulsi, while also featuring “a new generation of his interpreters and admirers.”
As diverse as the artist it commemorates, the text also includes never-before-seen drawings by Adnan. Her appearances in particular are not the brightly colored canvases she is associated with, Azimi says, “but rather something more intimate, specific and surprising. Something closer to the word.” It was that intimate, singularity that terrified me when I first encountered arab apocalypse, In the words of contributor Quinn Latimer, it is “a riot of color and fear that characterizes the destruction of Beirut”.. Being a young poet, I was resistant to the work and struggled against its “war in the empty sky”, its unheard prayers and the spreading multicolored sun. I thought, what could I do with these gaps and marks if I couldn’t determine them Meaning? These moments of gut wisdom are achieved through an uncertainty like this, if I told Adnan wieldedI doubt she would have disagreed with this. He may have emphasized that uncertainty is a non-certainty Dedication To. So while I thought of myself as opposed to poetry, I was actually experiencing the onslaught of questions that Adnan brought to both page and canvas. is not just an inquiry What happening, or How We live in the middle of it, but what can we do with A horrifying catalog of empire’s daily violence in the world.
This inquiry also worked into the relationships he formed with other artists. “Whenever there was something going on in the world that I was struggling with, I would write to her, and she always had a very clear, but also surprising vision of what that thing was,” Japanese-American poet Brandon Shimoda told me over Zoom. In fact, I first encountered Adnan’s work when Shimoda posted fragmented messages shared between the two authors on social media. “I wrote her a love letter,” he told me, recalling their first meeting in Lebanon in 2009. Within about a week, Adnan responded via email, and thus began their long-standing correspondence. “Dear Brandon,” she writes in an email, “we are between spring and something else, a season that has no name…when or where things suddenly meet and make sense and the word beauty applies.” Who talks like this? I asked myself, surprised by his confusing and obvious answers. When I jokingly ask Shimoda the same question he says that because of what she wrote, how she wrote, and what she was like, she was “a homo-sapien and an elemental as well as the closest approximation of a human being”.
My center… Various transmissions of Adnan exist. The Lebanese historian Fawaz Traboulsi, translated from Arabic by Yasmin Seeley, offers a visit to Atel in Paris just a week before his death. Asking to record as Traboulsi arrives, we hear Adnan arguing with Nietzsche and quoting Sufis. With filmmaker Lamia Jorige, Attell revisited the 1955 drama of a lover chased to America. Adnan and Swiss curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist, discuss the value of epiphany and spontaneity in poetry, as well as memory in relation to architecture. To the American poet Anne Waldman, Adnan writes, “Believe me, the thing that really matters most is love – passionate love or friendship, a few people being together for a few hours – and that makes living a wonderful thing.” Each voice-recording, interview and letter provides a different window into what it was like to live close to such an eccentric thinker.
But transmissions can be felt far beyond their point of origin. Poet and novelist Aria Abar, who was aware of Adnan’s importance to other poets she admired, developed an “obsession” with Adnan. arab apocalypse In 2019. Then in 2020, during the pandemic, she would spend hours looking at digital versions of Adnan’s paintings. For Eber, the works offered “a sense of home or reward when everything else was filled with death and sorrow.” In this text Eber’s offering is read with a trace of Adnan’s characteristic mysticism; The same peripheral clarity I have found in poets like Aimé Césaire and Edouard Glissant. His speaker wishes to “go beyond” his life, “to forsake that other shore, and see myself disintegrating, or shining.” Lyricism therein is an alternative wholeness that Adnan lived out, which is indicated by the totality of the quote from which the book’s title is taken.
Eber notes how Adnan’s rejection of centrality is interesting because he “is a guiding light” and an undeniable part of his “literary and spiritual cosmology”. For Brandon Shimoda, the paradox of the title is an expression of a thought process and evidence of Adnan’s constantly changing self, while, for Negar Azimi, the title speaks to the ways in which Adnan was a “wandering soul from another planet in more ways than one.”
Initial My center… On its opening pages, Etel Adnan speaks again. She looks straight at us and whispers, with all the sincerity and truth of a trickster, “If you meet me on the street, don’t be too sure it’s me.” don’t be sure This text suggests a different approach LookAs much as it suggests a different kind of Creature. This is our philosopher-poet playing in ambiguity, tricking us into recognizing him – on the chance that we may see ourselves among his dear friends in these pages. The precise center of this seventy-two page book is a cosmic exchange. His drawings of long arms and legs tell us:
I am yesterday and today and tomorrow / said the sun
And I am you / said the moon
She is bringing us to the crossroads, starting again. she is saying I am missing you.
