Fondazione Volume! presents “Yet Another Letter to the Reader”, a project by Walid Raad, one of the most original and influential voices of the artistic scene of Middle East. Raad’s artworks address how “Arab art” has been affected, materially and immaterially by the various conflicts that have devastated the Middle East in the past few decades. And moreover, he considers how the emerging new infrastructures hint at but also overlook these subtle and not-so-subtle changes.
Walid Raad
On display at Fondazione Volume!, “Yet Another Letter to the Reader” is a project by Walid Raad, one of the most original and influential voices of the Middle East artistic scene.
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- 01 February 2017
- Rome
More than thirty crates – normally used to carry and/or store works of art – come together to build walls and rooms, turning Volume! into a real and an imaginary storage place. A place that might have been inhabited by a restless painter who, as a contemporary Frenhofer, plunges his brushes in colors, lines, and forms, not for the creation of the Unknown masterpiece, but to “try to make available again (and for the first time)”, as Raad has said, works of art that have been affected with invisibility.
Raad’s crates are like membranes whose surfaces hold paintings. They seem to be displayed arbitrarily, linked only by the fact that they “reproduce” artworks painted by “Arab” artists. It is also clear that his surfaces may not necessarily correspond to the crates’ contents, bringing forth questions about the relations between the crates’ outside and inside, between container and contained. In this mnemonic and visionary labyrinth, fragments of Arab artworks emerge.
3 February – 20 March 2017
Walid Raad, Yet Another Letter to the Reader
curated by Claudia Gioia
Fondazione VOLUME!
via di San Francesco di Sales 86/88, Rome