Sea and Fog
Artists
- Etel Adnan
- Ouassila Arras
- Yael Bartana
- Nikola Bojić
- Damir Gamulin
- Mijo Gladović
- Damir Prizmić
- Cihad Caner
- Ali M. Demirel
- Simon Denny
- Otto Dix
- Cevdet Erek
- Marco Fusinato
- Mariam Ghani
- Shilpa Gupta
- Jina Khayyer
- Käthe Kollwitz
- Kateryna Lysovenko
- Sabelo Mlangeni
- Mohammad Salemy
- Erinç Seymen
Curators
- Çağla Ilk
- Misal Adnan Yıldız
- Sandeep Sodhi
Thanks to
Sea and Fog is the Große Landesausstellung 2024 of the Staatliche
Kunsthalle Baden-Baden.
Supported by the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg
"Morning. Vast. Imprecision. Fog has covered everything in gray absolute. This has lasted. Doubts loom over the mind. Absence is harder to accept than death."
(Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog, 2012)
The group exhibition Sea and Fog, which takes its title from a book by the artist and poet Etel Adnan (1925–2021), aims to create a space for the multi-layered perceptions of the existential challenges of our past, present and future by engaging with the history of the world wars and their impact on the present.
The First World War was one of the deadliest conflicts in history. More than nine million soldiers and six million civilians died worldwide; countless people were injured and more than 1.5 billion bombs destroyed cities and entire regions on the Western Front alone. The daily occurrence of new wars and disasters in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe, and worldwide make an examination of the First World War more urgent than ever.
The history of the two so-called world wars is often told from a European and North American perspective. Countless individual perceptions and fates from different cultures and regions continue to go unnoticed. However, these diverse stories illustrate the varied experiences of people during the wars. It is precisely this that reveals geographical and cultural interdependencies that go far beyond artificially drawn borders, nation states, and geopolitics.
In Sea and Fog the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden also reveals part of its own institutional history and asks what happened here in the city 110 years ago, in 1914, five years after the institution was founded, at the beginning of the First World War, and to what extent the founding myth of the museum is interwoven with this war.
So how are time and place reflected – then and now? And how do the artificial territorial borders drawn by the colonial powers and the subsequent world wars connect with the crises of the present? The ideological and political disillusionment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which laid the groundwork for fascism, communism, and countless conflicts, continues to reverberate. The exhibition Sea and Fog follows these entanglements and searches for answers, shelter and solace in the works of the artists presented and in the language of Etel Adnan.
Adnan was born in 1925 in French-occupied Beirut. During the Second World War she experienced the British and French troops in Lebanon and how Beirut became a small whirlwind of war and amusement. In 1955 she went to Los Angeles for her studies, and after the Algerian War of Independence refused to continue using the French language as an author in order to “paint in Arabic” instead. In the turbulent twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and at a time in which her homeland Beirut is once again burning and suffering from war, her life is like a spotlight on many.
Her book Sea and Fog (2012) describes how we move in a constant provisional state between the forces of nature and the unstoppable dynamics of time. In this context the exhibition interprets the “fog” described by Adnan as a symbolic element of emotional uncertainty. Like the book’s poems, the works in the exhibition deal with the shadows of the past and the enduring presence of doubt and loss. Taking the First World War as its starting point, the group exhibition Sea and Fog focuses on the man-made violence of war, its ceaseless repetition and the many individual fates associated with it.