FORTUNE
Annabel Daou
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
5:00 - 7:00pm
signs and symbols presents FORTUNE, a performance by artist Annabel Daou as part of artists & allies.
In this ongoing project, members of the public are solicited to partake in an intimate interaction in which they present their palms and receive their fortunes transcribed onto paper for a small fee. The reading/writing is entirely silent. It is structured around two questions: “where are you coming from?” and “where are you going to?” Considered in a social and historical context, the figure of the fortune-teller raises questions about belief and desire as well as class and cross-cultural interaction. Fortune telling is illegal in many places including New York City. In the depths of Dante’s Inferno, the fortune-tellers walk with their heads on backwards, punished for presuming to see the future.
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. She uses repetition and subtle shifts in the iteration of idioms and ordinary speech as a means of interrogating shared experience and misunderstanding.
Daou was born and raised in Beirut and lives in New York. Recent and upcoming projects include: Chou Hayda? an audio work at the National Museum of Beirut (through December 2018); a project on digital privacy that will take place in the New York Public Libraries (October-December 2018); and just one question, a solo show at Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin (November 2018).
FORTUNE, her ongoing silent fortune-telling project, has taken place in numerous institutional and anti-institutional contexts.