Exhibitions: Lebanese artist Walid Raad layers fantastic truths at MoMA

Scratching on things I could disavow, the centrepiece of a mesmerising art exhibition by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, begins unappealingly enough as a lecture – a sort of technologically abetted address or generic PowerPoint presentation suffered by legions of bored souls in conference rooms across the globe.

In front of a small audience assembled several times a week for the occasion, the artist stands in the flesh before a wall blinking with data and names of things arranged into a giant flowchart. The sprawling story he tells incorporates many sundry elements: people, places, percentages, equations, all linked up and interconnected.

Dressed in jeans, T-shirt and a baseball cap, Raad plays the role of a conceptual artist concerned with matters of art, the market, museums, a high-tech military cabal and cultural institutions taking up new positions in the Middle East. He talks about complicated money trails and moral quandaries shared among artists in international scenes in Los Angeles, London, Beijing, Mumbai and Mexico City.

At one point he takes leave of the flow chart and leads his audience around the exhibition space, as their collective confusion grows in proportion to his increasingly detailed explanations and rationales.

His historical facts are verifiable and true, Raad promises, before changing direction toward the allure of “other kinds of facts”.

Original article by Andy Battaglia

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Exhibitions: Lebanese artist Walid Raad layers fantastic truths at MoMA