Of Light & Folds

Etel Adnan’s contribution to the 2015 Istanbul Biennale was an artist’s book titled Family Memoirs on the End of the Ottoman Empire. This accordion-fold work contains the artist’s handwritten recollections, in Turkish and English, concerning her family and the catastrophic conflicts of the decade before her birth in 1925. As the text mentions politically sensitive material—social ties between Turkish and Armenian families before the 1915–17 Armenian-Assyrian-Greek G