For the first time in Brittany, Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain is devoting an entire exhibition to Etel Adnan (1925–2021), a major figure in contemporary art and literature. Through a collection of works covering over fifty years of creativity, Je suis eau et je me déplace highlights a period in her career that is relatively little known, her visits to Erquy in Côtes-d’Armor, presented here for the first time in a public institution.

From the late 2010s, Etel Adnan often stayed at Erquy, in Brittany, with her companion, the artist Simone Fattal. From the bay window of her apartment, she observed the port and the Channel, constantly transformed by the tides, changes in the light, birds in flight and passing boats. Her window became an observatory, and the bay one of the last landscapes of her work.

Etel Adnan was already a renowned woman of letters in the late 1970s, but her true fame as a visual artist came much later, when she took part in Documenta 13 in Kassel, in 2012. At the time she was 87 years old. From then on, her work attracted ever-increasing interest from critics and institutions in the art world, leading to many solo exhibitions all over the world, including at Mathaf in Doha (2014), the Serpentine Gallery in London (2016), the Arab World Institute in Paris (2016), the Zentrum Paul Klee in Berne (2018), SFMOMA in San Francisco (2018) and the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2021).

The works of Adnan are extremely diverse and generally small-scale, taking their inspiration from nature, from which she extracts the poetic essence. With remarkable freedom of form, the artist simplifies shapes, intensifies the dialogue between colours and lets her lines run as if writing a poem. The multiplicity of languages and techniques she explores also reveals the special attention she pays to two motifs running through her work: mountains, which she sees as anchor points, and the sea, associated with movement and travel.

"Je suis eau et je me déplace". The exhibition title, inspired by a phrase from her book Journey to Mount Tamalpaïs (1986), emphasises the deep connection felt by Etel Adnan with the sea, a constant presence in her life from her childhood in Beirut, on the shores of the Mediterranean, to the Pacific Ocean in California and, finally, to Erquy, in Côtes-d’Armor. Presented in two parts, the exhibition invites the visitor to travel through more than five decades of creation and to imagine the pathways that led to the Erquy period, that late and little-known period of her work.