Across the concertinaed pages of a 1970 leporello by the Lebanese American artist, writer, and philosopher Etel Adnan (1925–2021), a poem emerges (fig. 1). “The Mother and the Lost Daughter” (“Al-Umm wa Al-Ibna Al-Daʾiʿa”), by the Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, is transcribed in scattered verses, alternately handwritten in pen or painted in ink. The first pages of the leporello, read right to left, are covered in unevenly pigmented blue washes. A yellow sun half emerges from the wash, radiating across the fold of the page. These pages announce the poem and its author. Yet these namings are dispersed among various painted elements that erupt from the realm of the everyday or from indeterminate glyphic or symbolic orders of meaning. The hierarchy of text and image is destabilized: the text emerges no more strongly than the vase, hand, pair of scissors, or glyphlike stick figures...

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