Walid Raad - Let’s be honest, the weather helped

extended until 16 August

Walid Raad
Let’s be honest, the weather helped
(15 February – May 10)

In photographs, videotapes, sculptures, texts and mixed media installations Walid Raad explores how violence affects bodies, minds, culture and traditions. Playfully, he creates artworks that are at once dizzying, imaginative and illuminating. The exhibition at Moderna Museet is Walid Raad’s largest exhibition in the Nordic countries, and he will return several times this spring to guide visitors and perform his walkthrough performance Kicking the Dead and/or Les Louvres.

Walid Raad was born in 1967 in the village of Chbanieh in Lebanon. He grew up in Beirut and was eight when the civil war broke out, a conflict that claimed more than a hundred thousand lives, and lasted for fifteen years. In 1983, Walid Raad emigrated to the USA, where he now lives.

In the late 1980s, Walid Raad’s career took off with a major project that already has an established place in art history; The Atlas Group is an unparalleled enactment of an archive, with documents and lectures on the Lebanese wars. His subsequent projects, Sweet Talk: Commissions and Scratching on things I could disavow, also relate closely to the Middle East and how violence affects bodies, minds, art, culture and traditions. Raad’s focus is on the obvious as well as the less obvious consequences of situations of extreme physical and psychological violence. Despite the gravity of his subjects (car bombs, kidnapping, savage killings), Raad’s works are also humorous, tragic, bizarre and wondrous.

Throughout the exhibition, we find testimonies and stories about strange phenomena: Objects that suddenly lose their shadows, or how Raad’s own works of art once shrank to one hundredth of their original size. How can this be? Is this an allegory, fiction, poetry, and/or history? Or could it be that some situations of extreme violence force us to rethink what we consider to be common-sensical, rational, possible?

Walid Raad’s works, his stories and images, may be described as some kind of tragicomedy historical fiction. As he has stated, he makes art that that makes him ”chuckle (not laugh)” and that fill him ”with apprehension, alarm, and quiet uncertainty.”

Let’s be honest, the weather helped is a retrospective – but not chronological – exhibition, where works from the projects The Atlas Group, Sweet Talk: Commissions and Scratching on things I could disavow are presented side by side in an unprecedented way.

Throughout the exhibition period, Walid Raad will visit Moderna Museet several times to perform his work Kicking the Dead and/or Les Louvres, a 75-minute walkthrough performance at the intersection between lecture, guided tour and theatre. The performance is part of the exhibition and will take place in the exhibition space on 23 occasions. Raad will also do five guided tours of the exhibition.

Walid Raad’s art has been exhibited in Documenta, the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, the São Paulo Biennale and the Istanbul Biennale. He has also had solo shows at MoMa, the Louvre, the Whitechapel and the Stedelijk. He has been awarded several prizes, including the Hasselblad Prize, the Aachener Kunstpreis and the ICP Infinity Award.