Sea and Fog

07.11.2024–25.01.2025
An old projector displays animated characters on a screen.
A vacant art gallery with minimal decorations and large open doorways.
A minimalist painting with abstract color squares is hanging on a white wall.
A row of six black-and-white artworks displayed on a white gallery wall with shiny floor.
A modern, minimalist gallery space with several artworks on display.
Five monochromatic artworks line up on a gallery wall, each displaying unique imagery.
An art gallery displaying black-and-white photos arranged on white walls.
A white gallery wall displaying framed photographs of various subjects.
A modern room with lights on stands and mid-ground projection screen or platform.
A minimalist room featuring a lightbox with an image and a large reflector.
A modern art gallery showcasing an abstract painting and several other artworks.
An art gallery featuring colorful paintings and a blue exhibit room beyond an open door.
Art gallery room showcasing diverse paintings and an open doorway.
A single framed artwork on a blue wall in an empty gallery room.
Two framed artworks are displayed on a blue wall in a modern gallery.
A gallery with two artworks displayed separately against a blue and white wall.
Two nature-inspired artworks hung side by side on a grey and white gallery wall.
A pendant light hangs above a large, illuminated rock in a corner of a dark room.
A constructed wall made of wooden bricks in a gallery with debris on the floor.
A large stack of brown, bound documents with some scattered on the dirty floor.
Colorful bobbers attached to a rough, brown brick wall near a body of water.
An empty room with two projected circles against a hazy cityscape background.
An immersive room showcasing multiple projected images on surrounding screens.
An art gallery with numerous black and white photographs on a gray wall.
An art gallery with framed photographs and colorful shelving units on display.
A minimalist art gallery featuring three distinct installations on a polished floor.
This picture depicts a modern art gallery with framed exhibits and sculptures.
A door to a brightly lit room with minimalistic decorations on white walls.

Artists

  • Etel Adnan
  • Ouassila Arras
  • Yael Bartana
  • Nikola Bojić
  • Damir Gamulin
  • Mijo Gladović
  • Damir Prizmić
  • Cihad Caner
  • Ali M. Demirel
  • Simon Denny
  • Otto Dix
  • Cevdet Erek
  • Marco Fusinato
  • Mariam Ghani
  • Shilpa Gupta
  • Jina Khayyer
  • Käthe Kollwitz
  • Kateryna Lysovenko
  • Sabelo Mlangeni
  • Mohammad Salemy
  • Erinç Seymen

Curators

  • Çağla Ilk
  • Misal Adnan Yıldız
  • Sandeep Sodhi

Exhibition booklet

Thanks to

blank projects; Ishara Art Foundation; ifa - Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V.; Krupa Art Foundation; neugerriemschneider; PALAS; Sfeir-Semler Gallery; Ryan Lee Gallery, New York; Zilberman Gallery; pressel & müller architekten

Sea and Fog is the Große Sonderausstellung 2024 of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden.

Supported by the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg

"Morning. Vast. Imprecision. Fog has covered everything in gray absolute. This has lasted. Doubts loom over the mind. Absence is harder to accept than death."

(Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog, 2012)

The group exhibition Sea and Fog, which takes its title from a book by the artist and poet Etel Adnan (1925–2021), aims to create a space for the multi-layered perceptions of the existential challenges of our past, present and future by engaging with the history of the world wars and their impact on the present.

The First World War was one of the deadliest conflicts in history. More than nine million soldiers and six million civilians died worldwide; countless people were injured and more than 1.5 billion bombs destroyed cities and entire regions on the Western Front alone. The daily occurrence of new wars and disasters in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe, and worldwide make an examination of the First World War more urgent than ever.

The history of the two so-called world wars is often told from a European and North American perspective. Countless individual perceptions and fates from different cultures and regions continue to go unnoticed. However, these diverse stories illustrate the varied experiences of people during the wars. It is precisely this that reveals geographical and cultural interdependencies that go far beyond artificially drawn borders, nation states, and geopolitics.

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.

Curated program