signs and symbols

FORTUNE
Annabel Daou

Saturday, September 28, 2024
3:00 - 6:00pm

signs and symbols is delighted to present Annabel Daou’s FORTUNE during her current exhibition at the gallery, what is left of us. Taking place on Saturday, September 28 from 3 to 6pm, Daou will limit this performance to 18 fortunes; please contact the gallery to reserve a time.

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?”

The project inquires into trust, intimacy, and power. 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.

In the depths of Dante’s Inferno, the fortune-tellers walk with their heads on backwards, punished for presuming to see the future.

Since 2013, Daou has performed FORTUNE in numerous institutional and non-institutional contexts, including MoMA PS1, International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), WhiteBox, Dallas Art Fair, and a self-run storefront on Orchard Street. In 2019, Daou presented FORTUNE as the first performance-in-residence at signs and symbols, during which the artist performed every Sunday for the duration of 6 months.

annabel daou's work takes form in paper-based constructions, sound, performance, and video. Daou suspends, carves out, or records the language of daily life: from the ordinary or mundane to the intimately personal and urgently political. In her performance work she explores questions of trust, intimacy, cross-cultural exchange, and the operations of power. Her work frequently evokes moments of rupture and chaos but with the tenuous possibility for repair. Daou was born and raised in Beirut and lives in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include War Games at Galerie Tanja Wagner, DECLARATION at Ulrich Museum of Art, and Global Spotlight: Annabel Daou at Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington. Recent residencies include the Pollock-Krasner award at ISCP in New York and Haus Des Papiers in Berlin. A monograph of her work will be published by Distanz Publishing Berlin in 2024.