Secession Podcast: Artists features artists exhibiting at the Secession. This episode is a conversation between Simone Fattal and Jeanette Pacher, the curator of the exhibition. It was recorded on June 19, 2024 in the context of the exhibition: 

Simone Fattal
metaphorS
21.6. – 8.9.2024

In her exhibition metaphorS, Simone Fattal presents bodies of work from different periods in her career and in a variety of media, including fired clay and ceramic sculptures, paintings, and collages. With her works, she tells stories of humanity, culture, history, and the present. Conflict, consensus, nature, faith, and trust are central concerns. Despite (or precisely because of) the artist’s nomadic life, her oeuvre is deeply rooted in the millennia-old culture and history of the Middle East—she was raised in Damascus and Beirut—and the epic literature, poetry, archaeology, and landscapes of this region are both vital sources of inspiration and central themes. More 

Simone Fattal (*1942) was raised in Damascus and Beirut, studied archaeology and philosophy in France and began painting in Beirut in the early 1970s. After years of civil war, she left Lebanon in 1980 and settled in California, where she founded the Post-Apollo Press; for the next thirty years, she dedicated herself to publishing literature and poetry, including many books by her partner Etel Adnan. In the late 1980s, she studied sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute and fell in love with working with clay. Meanwhile, she also started making collages that combine pictures of archaeological sites and relics with contemporary photographs. Today, Simone Fattal lives and works in Paris.

Jeanette Pacher is a curator for contemporary visual arts and has been working at the Secession since 2007. She is a regular lecturer in the Department of Site-Specific Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and since 2023, a jury member of KÖR – Art in Public Space Vienna. She was part of the editorial team of Ö1 Kunstradio and began working in the curatorial field at Kunsthalle Wien in the mid 1990s.

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

Editing Director: Jeanette Pacher
Editor: Paul Macheck

Programmed by the board of the Secession
Produced by Jeanette Pacher