Walid Raad
Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut 1994)
October 12 – December 9, 2017
Audain Gallery (SFU downtown)
2PM @ Audain Gallery
Join us for an exhibition tour of Walid Raad: Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut 1994)
with Curator, Melanie O’Brian in Dialogue with Jeff O’Brien.
Part of the downtown gallery tour with the CAG at 3PM
Walid Raad’s work engages how forms of violence affect bodies, minds and culture.
Moreover, it queries the instability of documents, the role of memory and narrative in
conflict discourses, and the construction of histories in the face of ongoing
catastrophe. Raad’s practice includes photography, video, sculpture, and
performance, and relies on formal and conceptual conventions borrowed from
investigative journalism, documentary, narrative fiction, and comedy.
Raad’s Sweet Talk is an ongoing set of self-assigned photographic commissions that
look at the city of Beirut through thousands of negatives and digital files produced
since the mid-1980s. Since the end of the Lebanese wars (approximately 1975-
1991), Beirut’s ravaged downtown has been under reconstruction. In 1994, a
Lebanese company for the development of Beirut Central District was established,
launching the largest urban redevelopment project of the 1990s.
The works in Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut 1994) present images – preserved
referents – from Raad’s self-assigned commissions to consider the persistence of
ruins and effects of the war through the city’s redevelopment. The works at the
Audain Gallery present Beirut as shifting and transitory, rising and falling. They
unfold, double and mirror to reveal images of a city that is haunted psychologically
and materially. In theorist/artist Jalal Toufic’s words, ruins are “places haunted by the
living who inhabit them”; they are “anachronistic”, “resist the passage of time”, and
point to a “labyrinthine temporality”. Sweet Talk offers a way to think through to
Vancouver’s continuous expansion that elides its traditions pre-city. Raad undertook
research in Vancouver as part of his 2016 SFU Audain Visual Artist in Residence.
Raad was born in Chbanieh, Lebanon and works in New York where he is Professor
of Art in The Cooper Union. Solo exhibitions include the Louvre, Paris; Museum of
Modern Art, New York; Kunsthalle Zurich; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and
Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. His works have been shown in Documenta, Venice
Biennale, Whitney Biennial, Sao Paulo Bienale, Istanbul Biennial, and Homeworks.
He is a member of the Home Workspace Program in Beirut and The Gulf Labor
Coalition.
Jeff O’Brien is an art historian completing his PhD at UBC, where he is also a Liu
Scholar at the Liu Institute for Global Issues. His research explores the work of
contemporary artists who, in response to the protracted 1975-1991 civil war(s) in
Lebanon and al-Nakba in Palestine, construct counter-archives to make visible
disappeared and displaced populations.
Curated by Melanie O’Brian. Co-presented by SFU Galleries and SFU’s School for
the Contemporary Arts where Raad is Audain Visual Artist in Residence (AVAIR)
2016/2017.
For more information, http://www.sfu.ca/galleries/
Audain Gallery
149 West Hastings
Vancouver BC V6B 1H4
TUE, WED, SAT / 12 – 5PM
THU, FRI / 12 – 5PM
p: 778.782.9102
e: audaingallery@sfu.ca