signs and symbols

June 20 - July 20, 2021

Opening Online: Sunday, June 20, 6pm
Closing: Tuesday, July 20, 6pm

signs and symbols is pleased to present A Year Like Any Other, a video exhibition by Annabel Daou as part of the gallery’s series of online-only solo presentations of video works.

We wore the year on us. It left traces on the body, notes in the margins of our lives. A few sentences discovered sometime later describe some ordinary or extraordinary event, the sense of the moment, the mood of the time, the time of the year: early spring, that summer, last fall, another winter.

A Year Like Any Other is structured around 365 events that occurred somewhere in the world over the course of a year, charting the body moving through time and grappling with the physical and emotional spaces that constrain it.

Throughout the video, the body is by turns constricted and set free. The inside becomes outside as the world breaks in through scrims and screens, the piercing sounds of sirens and slashing of helicopter blades. A woman learns to dance a communal dance alone, without the arms of others to hook her arms into, without a lead to follow. Her head is caught. She twists in an awkward breathless attempt to escape.

What remains of a year? Marks on a wall. Fragments of disparate events. Residues of class and power. Whatever is left, whatever we find, becomes the story.

*Please note that Daou’s video will be viewable online from Sunday, June 20 at 6:00pm until Tuesday, July 20 at 6:00pm. Following the end of the exhibition, the video will only be accessible via private link and password. We trust that given our current circumstances, everyone will act in good faith and good will, understanding that these are primary artworks by our artists that are collected and which would otherwise be password protected.

annabel daou’s work takes place at the intersection of writing, speech and nonverbal communication. Her paper-and-tape constructions, sound pieces and performances explore the language of power and intimacy. Daou was born and raised in Beirut and lives in New York. She was recently a Pollock-Krasner resident at ISCP in 2019-20. Daou’s work has been shown at The National Museum of Beirut; The Park Avenue Armory, New York; KW, Berlin; The Drawing Room, London; and The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Public collections include: Baltimore Museum of Art; The Menil Collection; The Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul; and The Yale University Art Gallery. Her solo exhibition A Year Like Any Other is currently on view at Galerie Tanja Wagner, and her work is included in On Celestial Bodies at Arter in Istanbul and All I Think About Is You at Galerie Georg Nothefler.