Simone Fattal

A small-format biography of the artist Simone Fattal by Hans Ulrich Obrist, a close friend, published in the imagine/otherwise series.

Obrist travels with Fattal from her early years in Syria and her youth in Lebanon to the life she built between cultures in France. Their conversations, set within his prose, also turn to memories of war, her years of exile in California, and her interest in archaeology, history and myth, across five decades of painting, publishing and ceramic sculpture.

Born in Damascus in 1942, Fattal studied philosophy in Paris. In 1980 she moved from Lebanon to Sausalito, California, with her partner Etel Adnan and founded the Post-Apollo Press there, and in 1988 she went back to making art, including sculpture in clay.

Omar Kholeif introduces and annotates the text, with an essay placing Fattal's many paths in context, and Rasha Salti writes the afterword, "Warrior Women Fall From a Low Height". The series is designed by Simon Josebury of SecMoCo.

Sternberg Press and artPost21, 2025. 168 pages, softcover, 11 x 16 cm, with 69 colour and 33 black-and-white illustrations.