FORTUNE
Annabel Daou
Saturday, December 17, 2022
3:30 - 5:30pm
signs and symbols is delighted to present Annabel Daou’s FORTUNE for the first time since 2020. Daou will limit this performance to 12 fortunes.
In this ongoing project, members of the public are solicited to partake in an intimate exchange 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 superstition and belief as well as class, gender and cross-cultural interaction. The fortune-teller is at once a subject of suspicion and someone in whom trust is precariously placed. In this ongoing project, members of the public are solicited to partake in an intimate exchange in which they present their palms and receive their fortunes transcribed onto paper for a small fee.
annabel daou’s work takes place at the intersection of writing, speech and non-verbal modes of communication. Her paper-based constructions, audio/video works and performances explore the expressive possibilities of ordinary language and reveal intimacies between individual and collective experience. Frequently, her works evoke moments of rupture, chaos, instability and misunderstanding but always with the tenuous possibility of repair. Daou was born and raised in Beirut and lives in New York. Her 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, Houston; The Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul; the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita; and The Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. In 2019-20, Daou was a Pollock-Krasner resident at ISCP. Recent solo exhibitions include DECLARATION at Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Global Spotlight: Annabel Daou at Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (formerly Arlington Arts Center) and Gods and Grifters at Conduit Gallery in Dallas.
FORTUNE, her ongoing silent fortune-telling project, has taken place in numerous institutional and non-institutional contexts.