Walid Raad, We Have Never Been So Populated (Installation View), via Paula Cooper
Conceptual artist Walid Raad opens a new show of works this month at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, continuing his interest in investigative practice, stringing together works that explore a range of themes and histories in pursuit of hidden entanglements between art, politics, and the natural world.
Walid Raad, Epilogue II: The Constables (2021), via Paula Cooper
Raad’s work frequently explores notions of the global, of political and social interactions bound by the nature of the world, the natural world, and a range of unseen forces. The show takes these threads and runs with them here, drawing on a range of concepts and fragments culled from research and reading: invasive birds used as military weapons; paintings of clouds that appear on the backs of other paintings; gold and silver cups that attract particular arthropods; and “fickle” waterfalls. These phenomena bring up notions of “sanity,” according to the artist, and the act of witnessing as both a normal course of the phenomenological experience of the world, and equally that of a supernatural experience. The act of witnessing becomes bound up as trauma and spirituality, belief and vision becoming intricately linked.
Walid Raad, Epilogue II: The Constables (detail) (2021), via Paula Cooper
Walid Raad/The Atlas Group, We Have Never Been So Populated_ Plate III (1997/2020), via Paula Cooper
The show speculates on these propositions by displaying various documents and objects, narrating the artist’s encounters with their strange qualities, and proposing various explanations for their peculiarity. In the process, the exhibition opens several “investigative†paths into Lebanon’s protracted wars, art collecting and display, museum building, and other stories. The product of these experiences is a series of collages and prints, diagrams and cross-sections transmuted into a sort of shifting landscape of experience, while elsewhere, the artist collages together a series of world leaders from across the Middle East, each time asking the viewer to negotiate these strange mixtures of image and diagram, a sort of pseudo-scientific materiality that underscores the inability to reckon with the trauma of reality.
The show closes April 16th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Walid Raad: We have never been so populated [Exhibition Site]
