CANCELLED!
Konstfack University of the Arts, Crafts and Design and the Royal Institute of Art (Kungl. konsthögskolan) are very happy to announce an Artist Talk with Walid Raad.
The talk is part of a three-day long workshop with the artist and students from both schools.
Fee and open to students, faculty, staff and the general public.
About Walid Raad:
Between 15 February till 10th of May, Raad will have a retrospective at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, which will feature documents and scenarios that he either wishes existed or fears are already in existence. The exhibition’s curator, Fredrik Liew describes how “Raad proceeds from historical events to imagine seemingly ludicrous, bizarre, and wondrous situations and documents.”
The students will attend an artist talk with Raad, take part in a tour of the exhibition guided by the artist himself, and view an on-site performance, described as “at the intersection between lecture, guided tour and theatre.” The workshop will conclude with a conversation between the artist, students, and professors Petra Bauer from RIA and Lisa Tan from Konstfack.
Walid Raad was born in 1967 in Lebanon. His work has been very important and influential for its artistic engagement of images of war, memory and how violence affects bodies.
In the late 1980s, Raad developed what was to become a historically significant and widely exhibited project, The Atlas Group, in which he staged lectures on Lebanese history in the guise of a fictional historical preservation foundation. This and subsequent projects, such as Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut), and Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, have drawn from his personal experience of growing up in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), and have extended outward to fraught geopolitical issues of the larger Middle East region and its massive scaled cultural initiatives of late.
Yet there is far more to tell of Raad’s awareness and engagement of socioeconomic and political issues of the now.
Plainly visible on his profile page at The Cooper Union in New York where Raad is a Professor of Art, is his use of this space to remark on the school’s recent decision to charge tuition to students, a result of the institution’s financial mismanagement, for what was once a free education. Excessive student debt is just one of the many inequities and burdens adversely affecting the lives of working people.
For more information on the workshop, please email lisa.tan@konstfack.se or petra.bauer@kkh.se.