Sea and Fog

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.