With internecine conflagrations raging on multiple fronts, the world, at times, can feel dangerously close to having a nervous breakdown. With stoic pragmatism, Simone Fattal, who believes “one must first learn to govern oneself,” has tirelessly excavated both the throughlines and the fault lines of our shared, troubled histories.

Born in Syria, Fattal emigrated to California with her partner, the late poet and artist Etel Adnan (1925–2021), amid the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90). Incorporating the philosophies of Plato, Socrates, Heidegger, and Baudelaire into her paintings, collages, and sculptures, Fattal refracts the particularities of the present by way of investigations into the past. Evidenced most in her recent collages, where Greek mythology, Sufi mysticism, high fashion, the dancer Merce Cunningham, and the swollen cadavers of dead tyrants vie for attention, her works on paper represent a visual combustion of ancient sites and modern proclivities, infiltrated by the epic legacies and mythologies of vast regions and times. “History is a continuous movement,” she once wrote.