Walid Raad
Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy
There is a well-hidden clue to Walid Raad’s cerebral, hypertextual exhibition ‘Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: Stage Sets for a History of Art in the Arab World/Part 1–Volume 1–Chapter One: Beirut 1992-2005’ in Como, where he’s Visiting Professor at the Visual Arts course of the Fondazione Antonio Ratti. Halfway through an hour-long lecture (which he delivered in the space three times throughout July), Raad quotes a paragraph from ‘The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster’ (2000), an essay by Lebanese-Iranian writer, video-maker and collaborator Jalal Toufic. It’s an analysis of the opening sequence of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), in which a Japanese man tells to his French lover: ‘You have seen nothing in Hiroshima’. Toufic states that after such a tragedy, which surpasses the ‘normal’ horrors of war, it is possible for an entire tradition to vanish. The task of art is thus to both acknowledge and reveal this withdrawal, reflecting the absence of a living being, as mirrors do in vampire movies (as Raad puts it), in order to resurrect culture.
This new project, which Raad began developing last year with an exhibition at the Galerie Sfeir-Semler in Beirut, somehow signals the end of the Atlas Group (his collective alter ego). Raad records the visibility (or invisibility) of modern and contemporary Arab art at a time when high-profile museum-building in the Emirates has led some to celebrate a Renaissance of sorts in the Gulf states. He attempts to scrutinize the black hole created by decades of conflicts in the Middle East, going on to put forward a series of questions: once built, what will the public see in these pharaonic infrastructures? What if there’s no tradition to go back to? What if the tradition is just a counterfeit or, at best, a fiction? It’s tempting to link Raad’s strategies with the first UAE pavilion curated, by Tirdad Zolghadr at this year’s Venice Biennale, which includes audio guides (scripted by Shumon Basar) that subvert the rhetoric of national discourse.
Staged in the deconsecrated Church of S. Francesco, Raad’s exhibition is laid out as a dry, minimalist set for a theatrical play which may or may not take place (he defines the installations as ‘props’). The show is based on memories and facts that could be true, and on characters that may only be fictions. It’s a ‘stage’ flushed with the blinding white of white cubes. In the apse, under a spotlight, stands the lilliputian model of Raad’s first exhibition in Beirut (‘The Atlas Group (1989-2004)’, shown at Sfeir-Semler Gallery in 2008), hosting a series of shrunken artworks. A long, tall wall bisects the nave. On one side is On Walid Sadek’s ‘Love is Blind’ (Modern Art Oxford, UK, 2006) (2008-9), a black and white trompe l’oeil reproduction of Sadek’s installation for the 2006 group show ‘Out of Beirut’ at Modern Art Oxford (which also included Raad and Toufic). The original work comprised captions, texts and the approximate spaces that ten paintings by Mustafa Farroukh (the early-20th-century father of Lebanese art) would have occupied, though no actual works, because the artist couldn’t be reached.
On the other side, runs Index XXVI: Artists (2008-9), an almost invisible line of white vinyl names of Lebanese artists of the past century, written in Arabic and often misspelled, because ‘telepathically reconstructed by an anthropologist’ (as Raad puts it). By way of quintessentially western aesthetics, Raad puts to the test our assumption of seeing something, or possibly nothing, when confronted with Arab art. An unemotional, though challenging test for our ‘ways of seeing’, which does its best to get you lost in translations.
Barbara Casavecchia
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