Raed Yassin
Amnesiac Commissions
Past
13 February – 29 March 2014
11 Haritos Street, Kolonaki
Kalfayan Galleries are pleased to present the second solo exhibition in their Athens space of the Lebanese artist Raed Yassin. Titled “Amnesiac Commissions” the exhibition will open on Thursday, 13 February 2014.
Works of Raed Yassin, who is currently doing a residency at The Delfina Foundation in London, were recently exhibited at the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art and the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels. The artist’s solo exhibition, “Amnesiac Commissions” negotiates themes of personal and collective narrative and memory in an attempt to challenge a common survival tool, that of selective amnesia.
“Yassin Dynasty” consists of a series of porcelain works depicting several battles from the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) produced in Jingdezhen, the capital of porcelain production in China. The project is derivative from the work “China” (2012) that was made possible with the support of the Abraaj Group Art Prize. The “Yassin Dynasty” works are part-beautiful object, part-historical document, and part-mass-produced product. They echo the ancient tradition of recording victories at battle on vases and ceramics for the sake of posterity, and suggest that countless objects painted by different porcelain masters are being reproduced under the same fictional ‘dynasty’. The battles detailed on the exhibited works are ones that were instrumental for territorial, demographic and political shifts in Lebanon, and their ramifications are still tangible today. The works also embody the image of a Chinese decorative readymade object that could possibly be found in any Lebanese home. This merging between traditional, historical and artisanal elements creates a conceptually complex and multi-layered work.
Artist
Raed Yassin (born 1979, Beirut) is an artist and musician. He graduated from the theater department at the Institute of Fine Arts in Beirut in 2003, and since then has developed his conceptual practice through multiple mediums such as video, sound, photography, text, sculpture and performance. Yassin’s work often originates from an examination of his personal narratives and their position within a collective history, through the lens of consumer culture and mass production. He was a resident artist at De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2008-2010), the Delfina Foundation, London (2010 & 2014), Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne (2015), and is a recipient of the Abraaj Group Art Prize (2012). As a musician, he is one of the organizers of the Irtijal Festival for Experimental Music (Beirut), and has released several solo music albums, as well as part of groups such as “A” Trio and PRAED. In 2009, he founded his independent music label Annihaya. Raed currently lives between Berlin and Beirut.
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