VIENNA — After I consider Simone Fattal’s work, which I first noticed in 2019 at MoMA PS1, I envision figures looming at a threshold of sculptural articulation: two lengthy legs linked by an arch-like section, one thing suspended between structure and human likeness. The works appear to attract on historical archetypes — but Fattal has stated that she doesn’t in any respect really feel she is revisiting the previous. “I’m talking of the current,” she advised curator Cecilia Alemani in 2022, “however by way of varieties which inhabit me and include the previous.” Certainly, the vocabulary of her work attracts on historical myths that testify to the contradictions of human nature and its never-ending cruelty, brutality, bravery, and charm. They drive us to ask what, if something, the heroic can imply — what Gilgamesh, Dhat al-Himma, or every other epic determine can imply — in our personal warring occasions.
In metaphorS, a serious exhibition of Fattal’s work at the moment on view on the Secession, balls of fired clay spells out are engraved in Arabic with the names of Allah (“The 99 Names,” 2020), anchoring a dialog amongst largely current works. Roughly the dimensions of soccer balls, the six items invoking the names of the divine are positioned on the ground at a distance from, but in direct relation to, the 5 standing humanoid figures of the Guerrier sequence (Warrior, 2008), additionally of fired clay. It’s as if they had been poised in an historical recreation between mortal life and a heavenly energy that may be “Beneficent” and “Most Merciful,” as two of the orbs learn — but additionally “The Bringer of Demise” and “The Destroyer.”
Various collages and sculptures that includes spliced pictures of statues, ritual objects, landscapes, and archaeological websites reference the fragmented cultural areas of areas host to historical civilizations, which merge with the up to date loci of Fattal’s personal displacement. Born and raised in Damascus and Beirut, Fattal studied in Paris and later, fleeing the conflict in Lebanon, migrated to Sausalito, California, along with her accomplice, the poet and painter Etel Adnan. There, she based the Submit-Apollo Press and revealed poetry and progressive, experimental literature.
Adnan’s affect reveals in Fattal’s work. “IN OUR LANDS OF DROUGHT THE RAIN FOREVER IS MADE OF BULLETS” (2006, not on this exhibition), an ensemble of engraved basalt tiles itemizing the massacres of Palestinians from the 1948 Nakba, is titled after a poem by Adnan. However Fattal’s warriors additionally communicate extra usually to conflict’s violent uprooting and upheaval, the lack of the civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean, and the damaged transmission of tradition and custom to youthful generations who don’t have any reminiscence of peace in their very own lifetimes.
Among the present’s most stunning items are gleaming ceramic objects in blue, inexperienced, and pink hues resembling segments of waves glittering within the daylight. They introduce a component of lightness and ethereal magnificence, of the fragility of the passing second and the inevitability of everlasting change. Fattal has titled them Clouds (Faenza) (2023), including a message of joyful hope to this pensive exhibition.
Simone Fattal: metaphorS continues at Vienna Secession (Friedrichstraße 12, Vienna) by way of September 8.