Walid Raad

Raad is an artist and an Associate Professor of Art in The Cooper Union (New York, USA). His works include The Atlas Group, a fifteen-year project between 1989 and 2004 about the contemporary history of Lebanon, and the ongoing projects, Scratching on Things I Could Disavow and Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut). Raad’s books include “Walkthrough”, “The Truth Will Be Known When The Last Witness Is Dead”, “My Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair”, “Let’s Be Honest The Weather Helped”, and “Scratching on Things I Could Disavow”.

In 2007, Raad began his long-term project divided into chapters “Scratching on Things I Could Disavow”. The exhibited installation forms part of this project. Raad was inspired by the mushrooming of contemporary art institutions in the Arab countries and the emergence of the so-called “modern Arab art”. When exhibited in new museums, according to the artist, this art may “lose its shadow”. Akin to his other projects, the artist works here with fiction, legend and confabulation. “Letters to the Reader” are samples of walls for the new Museum of Modern Arab Art – wherever it is to be built – in Amman, Doha, Abu Dhabi or New York. As Raad writes in his text, the walls were created by the Arab artist Suha Traboulsi and they were found in the basement of one of the hospitals in Sao Paulo. Traboulsi was building them as an emigrant in Brazil in the 1930s in order to react to “the fall of Arab art”, which had “started to lose its shadow”. The artist managed to build only 11 out of 276 planned walls. The objects were found and restored by Raad for the 23rd Sao Paulo Biennial. The project borrows inspiration from Jalal Toufic’s concept “the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster” that concerns the impact of disasters on tradition and culture.