Walid Raad shows at the dOCUMENTA (13)
Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World, 2010-2012
Performance Lectures, Mixed-media installation, including films, sculptures, prints and sound
Walid Raad presents Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, a series of one-hour walkthroughs for visitors guided by the artist through his installation of miniature artworks. The project revolves around the (art) history of the Arab world, its present and future, and oscillates between fact and fiction, documentation and interpretation.
Scratching on Things I Could Disavow engages with the fast-paced development in cities such as Abu-Dhabi, Beirut, Cairo, Doha, Istanbul and Sharjah of a new infrastructure for the visual arts. In a context where cultural tourism has become an instrument of economic growth and power, Raad’s project considers the ideological, economic and political dimensions of this phenomenon to ask whether and how culture and tradition in the Arab world may have been affected, materially and immaterially, by the various wars that have been and are still being waged in this volatile region. Raad’s works also lean on Jalal Toufic’s concept of “the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster.”
Walid Raad takes the visitor from a detailed case study of The Artist Pension Trust and its enmeshment with a network of neoliberal actors, to an account of the accelerated emergence of art spaces and institutions in the Arab world, and finally to inexplicable physical phenomena like the flattening of art spaces, the shrinking of artworks, and the availability of colors, lines, and forms for contemporary Arab artistic creation.
Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World expands upon the research-based methodology of Raad’s The Atlas Group (1989–2004), the visual and performative archival project he has initiated to document the social, political, psychological and aesthetic conditions of the Lebanese wars (1975–1990/91). The new project marks a critical juncture in Raad’s practice, at once a departure from The Atlas Group while expanding its historical and theoretical reference. The form of this project is an exhibition / performance. It was first shown by TBA21 in Vienna in 2011.
(after Taswir Projects)
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