SIMONE FATTAL for MoMA PS1
Produced and Directed by Joe Cohen
Edited by Joe Cohen and Benjamin Huguet
A series of films commissioned by MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) for their Spring 19 exhibitions.
MoMA PS1 presents the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of the work of Simone Fattal (Lebanese and American, b.1942). The retrospective brings together over 200 works created over the last 50 years, featuring abstract and figurative ceramic sculptures, paintings, watercolors, and collages that draw from a range of sources including ancient history, mythology, Sufi poetry, geopolitical conflicts, and landscape painting. Simone Fattal: Works and Days explores the impact of displacement, as well as the politics of archeology and excavation, as these themes resonate across the artist’s multifaceted practice. Fattal’s work constructs a world that has emerged from history and memory, and its replications and repetitions grapple with the losses of time while revealing its reoccurrences. Never far from the earth, her works emerge as an unfinished project of telling the stories of ancient history with figures taken from central references such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Dhat al-Himma, and others. Both timeless and specific, her work straddles the contemporary, the archaic, and the mythic.