“Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut 1994)“ Exhibition: October 12 – December 9, 2017
Audain Gallery: Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, 149 West Hastings Street
Walid Raad in Conversation with Jayce Salloum on Beirut Tuesday, October 10, 7pm
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.
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.
Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He was born in 1962 in Beirut or
Baghdad and died before dying in 1989 in Evanston, Illinois. He was most recently a
participant in the Sharjah Biennial 11, the 9th Shanghai Biennale, Documenta 13, Art
in the Auditorium III (Whitechapel Gallery) and Six Lines of Flight (SF MOMA). In
2011, he was a guest of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD.
Jayce Salloum has worked in installation, photography, video, performance and text
since 1978, as well as curating and coordinating a vast array of cultural projects. He
lives and works in Vancouver on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh
land. His practice exists within and between the personal, quotidian, local and the
trans-national. It aligns with social and political struggles through an intimate
subjectivity and discursive challenge by engaging the personal, reconsidering
notions of identity, community, history, boundaries, exile, the nation/state, and
resistance.
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.