Simone Fattal: Finding a Way

Simone Fattal is cosmopolitan and itinerant—she was born in Damascus but raised in Beirut. She moved to London before studying in Beirut, Leuven, and Paris. Then, she briefly returned to Beirut once more before emigrating to Sausalito. Currently she resides in Paris. Her practice, too, has been both peripatetic and protean, including excursions into painting, collage, drawing, illustration, film, sculpture, translation, and publishing. During an interview with Negar Azimi in 2019, the artist mused that she had simply “found her way.”¹

Finding a Way is also the title of Simone Fattal’s institutional debut in the UK. At the Whitechapel Gallery in London, she has made over the brick-lined commission gallery on the first floor into a giant kiln, a structure that evokes change and transformation. Five of Fattal’s iconic sculptures—four fragmented figures made of clay and one of bronze—populate the gallery, filling it with totems and enigmatic rituals. Fattal’s delicate arrangement includes stelae, clouds, trees, a centaur, a ladder, a ziggurat, and, ultimately, a rose. They suggest different stations on a poetic, transformative quest, as Fattal’s figures sojourn towards immortality.

Finding a Way is foremost a meditation on fragments, a topic that has long preoccupied Fattal. In 2019, she confided to Barbara Casavecchia that “we only have fragments; we do not and cannot have any real knowledge of the past.”² Similarly, Fattal’s ceramic figures are often missing faces, arms, or limbs. Yet they carry a persistent presence, anchored in their potent three-quarter-scale, their gestures and positioning. In Finding a Way, The Master and Walking Men I–IV (all 2021) hunch, limp, and contort in pain. The stagnancy of their poses suggests a hesitance to move forward, in the exhibition as in life. As the artist puts it, “Everybody has to undertake their own travels toward knowledge, and then make a choice.”³

Six etchings included here evoke Fattal’s own early memories of old Damascus:

The gardened city was still very small at that time, as in ancient times. You could climb up Mount Qasioun and look down and you’d see a ring of orchards, olive trees and fruit trees below. It was quiet when you entered Damascus—there was this tremendous silence in the evening. It was mysterious. There was an extraordinary sense of history. The river Barada ran through the city—it’s disappearing. My grandfather had a big farm, it was called Boustan El Leil [Garden of the Night].⁴

Fascinated by a visit to the Louvre, where Fattal encountered an exhibition on seventeenth-century city-planning engraved from imagination, she fashioned similar etchings of the historic Damascene souks, gardens, and mosque in her distinct free-flowing hand.

Fattal’s sculptural subjects carry broader, but ultimately no less personal, associations. Cloud (2021), for example, evokes dreamscapes but also potentially clouds our feelings or judgments, while the Tree of Life suggests personal development and growth. Similarly, the centaur, the ladder, and the ziggurat conjure the ghosts of old tales and scriptures that inhabit Fattal’s vibrant cosmos. Here, they represent stages on the grueling odyssey undertaken by The Master and the Walking Men I–IV. Lifted from both Greek and Roman Mythology, the centaur merges human and equine characteristics, marrying the physical with the mental or spiritual in a figure that inhabits the liminal space between being and becoming. Meanwhile, the Sumerian ziggurat and a ladder, which recalls Jacob’s Ladder as described in Genesis 28:12, are arranged at opposite ends of the exhibition. Both motifs insinuate a divine presence and restore the link between heaven and earth by way of personal desire or effort. They deepen the artist’s expansive use of myth and scripture, which ranges from Sumerian tales and Sufi philosophy to the Old Testament and the Quran. Fattal’s commission culminates in a delicate, budding rose that is almost hidden in the brick-lined wall at the rear of the gallery. This is lifted from a scene in the Epic of Gilgamesh in which, after the death of his friend Enkidu, a grieving Gilgamesh embarks on a journey to find the immortal Utnapishtim. After many trials and tribulations, Gilgamesh encounters a flower instead of Utnapishtim. The budding rose trades death for immortality, like a talisman or “symbol of the resilience of nature and its tenacity in the face of human folly.”⁵

Finding a Way is also a meditation on place, another topic dear to the artist’s heart. In London, Fattal delved into the history of the Whitechapel District, where the gallery was founded in 1901. Flemish immigrants inhabited the area around Brick Lane in the fifteenth century and fashioned Delftware. Moreover, the Whitechapel Gallery itself was built in durable yellow London clay—both of these factors inform the commission’s conceptualization as a giant kiln. Similarly, Fattal explored the gallery’s use as a reading room for the adjacent Whitechapel Library between 1892 and 2009. As publisher and founder of the Post Apollo Press, she put together a library in the corridor behind the exhibition. Copies of Etel Adnan’s Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz) (Post Apollo Press, 1993), Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869), Fyodor Dostoevsky's Demons (1872), and Abdelrahman Munif’s City of Salt (1984) are found alongside catalogs of Fattal’s own ceramics and drawings.

In forgoing a larger survey, like the 2019 retrospective Works and Days at MoMA PS1, Simone Fattal has rendered her commission deeply intimate and personal. It intertwines her personal history of being and becoming with that of the Whitechapel Gallery, and the artist’s delicate storytelling and sense of translation, time, and place, as well as the reduced choice of works on display, potently conveys the old truth that sometimes, less is more. Finding a Way is like a well-worn photograph kept in your wallet or diary—a fleeting snapshot in time that we cannot let go of. I will treasure mine forever.

1. Negar Azimi, ‘History is a Continuous Movement’: An Interview with Simone Fattal, Frieze (March 15, 2019), https://www.frieze.com/article/history-continuous-movement-interview-simone-fattal.
2. Barbara Casavecchia, Traveling Translations: Simone Fattal, Mousse Magazine (October 21, 2019), https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/simone-fattal-barbara-casavecchia-2019.
3. Ibid.
4. Negar Azimi, ‘History is a Continuous Movement’: An Interview with Simone Fattal, Frieze (March 15, 2019), https://www.frieze.com/article/history-continuous-movement-interview-simone-fattal.
5. Iwona Blazwick, “Giving to Voiceless Earth, A Voice…”, Simone Fattal: Finding a Way, London: The Whitechapel Gallery, 2021, p. 10.
6. Barbara Casavecchia, Traveling Translations: Simone Fattal, Mousse Magazine (October 21, 2019), https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/simone-fattal-barbara-casavecchia-2019/.