From “The loudest muttering is over” (2024/2024) by Walid Raad. (Credit: The artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg)
Going to see an exhibition by Walid Raad is always like venturing into unchartered territory, like walking a fine line that separates the real from the imaginary and almost makes you walk on eggshells. One wonders what to believe and what to take at face value.
It is precisely on this porous border between reality and fiction that the Lebanese artist has built her entire body of work. A visit to her website is enough to make you wonder whether Raad is a real character or the fruit of a mad artist's imagination. The page describing his biography, with white space, reads as follows: “Walid Raad is a ______ and a ______ (______, ______). Raad's works to date include ______, ______, ______, ______ and ______. Raad's recent works include ______ and ______. Raad's work has been shown at ______ (______, ______), the ______ Biennale (______, ______), ______ (______, ______), the ______ Museum (______, ______), ______ (______, ______) and many other museums and venues in ______, ______ and ______. His books include ______, ______, ______ and ______. Walid Raad is also a member of ______ (______ , www.______.org). Raad currently lives and works in ______ (______, ______). ”
It's impossible to find a single portrait or photo of the artist. In this sense, from his personal biography down to each and every fork in the road of his work, with its many twists, there is something of the ambiguous, the doubtful, the elusive, the open to interpretation that envelops everything that has to do with Raad.
Take, for example, the Atlas Group (1989-2004), his colossal project to research and archive contemporary Lebanese history. In the project that the artist launched in 1989, it's almost impossible to tell the real from the fake. All of which brings us back to the fact that, as a journalist, understanding and then attempting to explain or even relate his exhibitions (each of which is nevertheless a treat for the brain) to a reader not necessarily familiar with Raad's work, is a headache.
“Comrade Leader, comrade Leader, how nice to see you,” single-channel projection, black & white, silent, six paper silhouettes 00:39:22, loop Edition of 1 + 1 AP. Installation by Walid Raad: “Another Festival of (In)gratitude”, 2024, Sfeir-Semler Karantina. (Credit: The artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg)
Walid Joumblatt and Samir Geagea's birthday cakes
"Festival of (In)gratitude" (with recent and new works) by Raad occupies both spaces of the Sfeir-Semler gallery, the Karantina and the new premises opened just over a year ago in the Port district. In both places, the lovely gallery staff who usually volunteer to guide us through the exhibitions, began by politely warning us that, this time, the artist has given strict instructions not to explain or subtitle the works on show.
The enigma of Raad's exhibition thickens. To avoid this trap, we've decided to tell you about "Festival of (In)gratitude" as it is presented, i.e. with no regard for what is real and what has been invented.
The tour opens with the installation "Comrade Leader, comrade Leader, how nice to see you _ XIII (2024)," which shows four of the 117 Lebanese waterfalls that have changed names at least once to an Arab, Western or Soviet bloc leader. The immersive video installation of these four waterfalls, which have changed names at least five times, transforms the room into a veritable flood, with figures of Margaret Thatcher, Gaddafi, Yasser Arafat and others standing at the foot of the waterfalls, seemingly unaffected by the slightest drop of water that they themselves have caused.
In the second room shine the watercolors by Raad's (imaginary?) collaborator, artist Suha Traboulsi, which he found a few years after her death in a file called "Festival of (In)gratitude." At first abstract, these watercolors tell a closer story of Traboulsi's personal history. More specifically, it expresses her speech problems, which she reformulates on these canvases through newspaper cuttings in a “word salad” that takes us back to Lebanese history.
"Festival of (In)gratitude" is situated in this in-between, somewhere between official and distorted history. It features three graphic panels commissioned by the Finance Ministry from Manal B. Tarabay (another Raad collaborator) to accompany their investigators' presentations to the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the US Treasury Department. It also includes a whole series of images sent anonymously to the Atlas Group in 1997, listing an invasive species of bird that a left-wing militia had bred in 1981 with the aim of sending them into enemy territories to destroy the ecosystem.
A view of Walid Raad's exhibition: “We lived so well together,” 1991/2021, 8 pigment inkjet prints, 72 x 60 cm each, edition 3 + 1 AP. “We have never been more populated”, 1997/2020, 7 pigment prints, 84 x 60.5 cm each, edition 5 + 2 AP, pigment inkjet prints. Center: “I long to meet the masses once again”, 2019, wood, 378 x 263 x 100 cm, unique piece. (Credit: The artist and Sfeir-Semler Beyrouth/Hamburg)
Further on, there's also a series of photos sent (also anonymously) to the Atlas Group in 2003, by a teenager who had been asked to photograph a series of cakes from his favorite Beirut patisserie. The teenager realized, much to his or her chagrin, that these kitschy cakes, emblematic of Beirut pastry shops, were in fact the birthday cakes of warlords, as the note accompanying the yellow envelope explains: “I realized that this pastry shop was also the favorite of Lebanese warlords and politicians. I came to this conclusion when I organized the order dates and the first names on the cakes, and found that they coincided with the birthdays of the warlords: Oct. 25 and “Samir” for Samir Geagea; Jan. 22 and “Amine” for Amine Gemayel; Aug. 7 and “Walid” for Walid Joumblatt; Sept. 7 and “Omar” for Omar Karami, and so on.”
Walid Raad, “Festival of Gratitude”, 2003/2021 12 pigmented inkjet prints 42 x 59.5 cm each, edition 5 + 2 AP. (Credit: The artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg)
Heads or tails?
Through Raad's dark humor, he ties these personal fictions to the political and collective order. He places his works in a historical context and succeeds in extracting them from it.
Therein lies the magic, even the slightly Dadaist dreaminess, of his artistic gesture. This same approach underpins the second part of "Festival of (In)gratitude," which continues in the second space of the downtown Sfeir-Semler gallery, where the artist shows an installation by his (imaginary) collaborator Manal B. Tarabay.
“The loudest muttering is over," 2024 VW Beetle, installation by Manal B. Tarabay, Walid Raad collaborator, unique piece. (Credit: The artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg)
This multimedia installation also connects an intimate event of Tarabay's with a historical fact, namely the bombardment of Lebanon in 1983 and 1984 by the most decorated American warship, the USS New Jersey. The installation's text — attributed to Tarabay — tells of her birth in 1983, “the day the USS New Jersey fired its 16-inch guns on our village.”
At 16, when Tarabay received her first car — a Volkswagen Beetle — she discovered at the same time that the projectiles launched by the USS New Jersey were called “flying beetles,” that Brooke Shields had visited this ship off the Lebanese coast during the year she was born. Also, she discovered that many years later the actress had even become the ambassador for the “Boom” car launched by Volkswagen.
From this telescoping of the private and the historical, Raad and Tarabay unfold an installation at the center of which sits a VW Beetle from the 1980s. Around it are photographic cut-outs of warships, Lebanese leaders including Amine and Bachir Gemayel and Brooke Shields. The visuals form a horizon where the political, the historical and the military intermingle, but also invoke something deeply funny and intimate.
"Heads or tails?" We asked ourselves as we emerged from this striking installation, as we do every time we leave a Walid Raad exhibition. The artist's magic and intelligence continue to elicit with undiminished amplitude, both unsettling and poignant.
This article was originally published in L'Orient-Le Jour; English version was edited by Yara Malka.
