The Arab Apocalypse

Etel Adnan, Pierre Audi, Samir Odeh-Tamimi

Etel Adnan (1925-2021) was a Lebanese-American artist, poet and essayist, writing in French and English. Born in Beirut, she moved to Paris after a long period of residence in California. She began painting in the 1960s and her work has received international recognition since DOCUMENTA(13), in 2012. In 2014, she was invited to the biennial of the Whitney Museum (New York) and the Qatar museum of modern art, the Mathaf, which dedicated a retrospective to her, organized by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Since then, numerous museums (Bern, Luxembourg, San Francisco, Aspen, Lille, etc.) and art centres have devoted exhibitions to her. Adnan’s works appear in numerous collections, including the MNAM-Center Pompidou, Paris; Mathaf, Doha, Qatar; MoMA, New York; M +, Hong Kong; Royal Jordanian Museum, Amman; the Museum of Modern Art, Tunis; Sursock Museum, Beirut; Institute of the Arab World, Paris; British Museum, London; Tate Gallery, London; World Bank Collection, Washington D.C.; National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; as well as in many private collections. 

Samir Odeh-Tamimi is a composer, born in Jaljulia near Tel-Aviv. He came to Germany at the age of 22 to study musicology and composition. While engaging with compositional role models such as Giacinto Scelsi and Iannis Xenakis, he also found himself coming to terms with the musical culture of his home country. Samir Odeh-Tamimi has been a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin since 2016 and in that same year was awarded a German Music Author’s Prize by GEMA. Photo credit: Harald Hoffmann

Born in Beirut, Lebanese director Pierre Audi studied at Oxford University and founded, in 1979, in London, the Almeida Theatre and its contemporary music festival, which he directed for a decade. The Amsterdam Opera House, which he directed from 1988 to 2018, was named Opera House of the Year in 2016 during his tenure, and then lent its stage to many of his productions. There, he presented a Monteverdi cycle, the first in-house production of Wagner’s Ring, as well as numerous works by Landi, Rameau, Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Rossini, Berlioz, Verdi, Puccini, Schoenberg, and Messiaen. Photo credit: Joel Saget