Festival of (in)gratitude

Festival of (in)gratitude Walid Raad Acting as guide through his own exhibition, Walid Raad returns to the Festival d'Automne and leads us from Beirut to Tunis, and from the Lebanese mountains to Ljubljana.

Between missile craters and gaps in memory, we gradually abandon the temptation to distinguish what is created from what is found, in order to consider what art and history do to images.

Walid Raad invites us to wander among a set of recent works drawn from his three long-term projects presented, among other places, at the Festival d'Automne: The Atlas Group, on the modern wars of Lebanon; Sweet Talk, on the reconstruction of Beirut after 1990; and Scratching on Things I could Disavow, on the history of art in the Arab world.

Visitors experience a double mediation: aesthetic on the one hand, carried out by the works and by the formal treatment Walid Raad gives to the documents collected during his research; and narrative on the other, the guided tour weaving the threads that connect seemingly disparate works into a story full of surprises and digressions.

The whole begins from a historical knot that strangely resembles our present, the years 1982-1983, with the occupation of Lebanon, the massacres of Sabra and Chatila and the expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization to Tunis, and unfolds its diffractions across time and space.

What is the link between the Volkswagen Beetle, the aircraft carrier USS New Jersey, Yasser Arafat's beds, property mafias, Playgirl magazine and the storerooms of the Ljubljana museum?

Beyond the answer to this question, Festival of (in)gratitude offers a profound reflection on art and history, emotion and memory, guilt and vampires.