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.

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.

**Top:** Walid Raad, installation view at MoMA, 2015. **Above:** Walid Raad, Letters to the Reader, 2014. MDF wood and paint,11 panels, each 240 x 121.9 cm + wall text. Installation view, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 2016 © Walid Raad. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

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.

Walid Raad, Jumex Foundation, © Moritz Bernoully

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.

Walid Raad & SITU Studio, Those that are near. Those that are far, Stomeln in Pulheim, Germany. © Wer- ner Hannappel — Walid Raad & SITU Studio, *Those that are near. Those that are far*, Stomeln in Pulheim, Germany. © Werner Hannappel

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

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.

Latest on News

Latest on Domus