Oracular Transmissions weaves together three of the most recent collaborative projects Etel Adnan and Lynn Marie Kirby have completed through processes of exchange and translation: Back, Back Again to Paris (2013), The Alhambra (2016), and Transmissions (2017).
The book also includes poems by Denise Newman, a friend to both Adnan and Kirby, and an introduction by Kadist Foundation curator Jordan Stein presenting their works and performances.
Design and typography by Brian Roettinger bring these numerous transmissions—video, performance, photography, email and other texts—together in one volume.
Etel Adnan (1925-2021) was a
Lebanese-American writer and
painter. Since the 1960s, she has been making accordion-fold books, or leporellos, that meld visual and verbal observation, fusing the artist's parallel practices in painting and writing as she transcribes poems and records unfolding landscapes and urban spaces. Adnan's artworks feature in numerous collections, including Centre Pompidou, Paris, Mathaf, Doha, Qatar, Royal Jordanian Museum, Tunis Modern Art Museum, Sursock Museum, Beirut, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, British Museum, London, World Bank Collection, Washington D.C., and National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington D.C, as well as within many private collections.
Lynn Marie Kirby is a San Francisco-based artist interdisciplinary who makes films, videos, and site-responsive installations, often with text-based components, using emerging technologies and site interventions to excavate and reveal the traces and effects of the past on the present. Focused on questions of place, the residue of history, and social choreography, her conceptual practice engages time as a material, different sensory systems, improvisation and collaboration, accidents that make her jump, and forms of contemplation.
