As part of this year's Festival d’Automne, Walid Raad will present Festival of (in)gratitude, a one-person exhibition at Le CENTQUATRE-PARIS, on view from October 23 through November 22. The exhibition proposes "a stroll from Beirut to Tunis, and from the mountains of Lebanon to Ljubljana, between missile craters and memory gaps [...], prompting us to focus on what art and history do to images." The artist will host daily guided walkthroughs for the duration of the exhibition.
Raad invites us to wander among a collection of recent works taken from his three long-term projects, presented, among others, at the Festival d’Automne: The Atlas Group, based on the different wars of present-day Lebanon; Sweet Talk, on the reconstruction of Beirut after 1990; and Scratching on Things I could Disavow, on art history in the Arab world. Visitors have the experience of a dual cultural mediation: aesthetic, on the one hand, via the different works and Raad’s formal treatment of the documentation collected during his research; and narrative, on the other, the guided visit, interweaving, in a narrative which is full of surprises and digressions, the different elements that link together these works which, at first, seem to have little much in common. The point of departure is a crossroads in history which bears uncanny similarities to our present day—the years 1982-1983 with the occupation of Lebanon, the massacres of Sabra and Chatila and the expulsion of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in the direction of Tunis—and unfurls their various diffractions in time and space. What is the link between the Volkswagen Beetle, the USS New Jersey aircraft carrier, Yasser Arafat’s beds, real estate mafias, the magazine Playgirl and the reserves of the museum of Ljubljana. Going beyond the answer to this question, Festival of (in)gratitude invites a profound reflection on art and history, emotion and memory, guilt and vampires.