Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist

There are few lives that have charted the dislocations, tectonic shifts, passions, and innumerable heartbreaks of the modern Arab world more thoroughly than Etel Adnan. Born in Beirut in 1925 to a Greek mother from Smyrna and a Syrian father who served with the Ottoman army, she is a writer of searing, sometimes surrealist heights. A rare sort of polymath, she is also a distinguished visual artist whose work spans myriad media. In this exhibition—Adnan’s first large-scale retrospective—individual rooms will be dedicated respectively to painting, drawing, film, writing, and leporellos, the accordion-like books she fills with Arabic poetry that, combined with images, engages the eyes and ears the way the best films do. Never-before-seen tapestries Adnan designed in the 1960s while living in California (she says she “missed the feel of Persian rugs”) and two unique ceramic walls will round out this very long overdue homage.

— Negar Azimi