A number of wooden crates of different sizes are grouped together to form a large surface, on which several paintings are painted. These paintings are reproductions of works by various Arab artists acquired by the Lebanese state for its planned museum of modern art, which never opened its doors to the public. Throughout the past decades, Lebanese political figures have gifted themselves and others many of these paintings without making the acts public. Suha Traboulsi (b. 1947, Freetown/Ascona), Chief Registrar of Public Collections in the Lebanese Ministry of Culture for three decades, painted a replica of each gifted/stolen painting on the wooden crates in the Ministry’s storage in protest. Allegedly, the original crates of the copied paintings have since been destroyed, but apparently some of the crates were reproduced when Walid Raad (b. 1967, Chbanieh/New York) urged Traboulsi to do so. Yet Another Letter to the Reader (Ref.0057.1b – 0065.5f) presents some of Traboulsi’s painted crates.
Raad’s practice considers how violence affects bodies, minds, and culture. His works, such as The Atlas Group (1989–2004), consist of stories told through photographic images, documents, films, and artist talks. His stories, which combine historical and fictional elements, “are made possible by the Lebanese wars of the past few decades,” he has stated. Through his meandering and precise storytelling, full of abstraction and projections, we are led to discover, question, and challenge the narratives that are unfolding and experienced – fictional and/or real. MW
self-presentation:
For a long time, I was convinced that the following passage, written by Jalal Toufic, was describing an experience I had communicated to him. I was wrong. Toufic had written it long before I met him:
Like so many others, he had become used to viewing things at the speed of war. So for a while after the civil war’s end, he did not take any photographs nor shoot any videos, waiting until he learned to look again at a leisurely pace. This period of adjustment lasted a full two years. Yet even after he became used to looking at buildings and experiencing events at the rhythm of peace, the photographs of the ruins in Lebanon taken by this Lebanese photographer, who classically composed those of his photographs shot in other countries, still looked like they were taken by a photographer lacking time to aim since in imminent danger, the compositions haphazard and the focus almost always off.
