For more than twenty years, Raed Yassin has been playing with freighted categories such as fact, fiction, history and identity, rifling through non-institutional archives of Egyptian cinema, Lebanese radio and pan-Arab popular culture for his source materials.
Warhol of Arabia (2016-2018) hinges upon a widely known but rarely examined anecdote about Andy Warhol’s visit to Kuwait to stage an exhibition in 1977. Starting from some photographs and press clippings he located in the Sultan Gallery archives, Yassin extrapolates a tale wherein, in the late 1970s, when Warhol’s star was fading, he travelled to the region in search of portrait subjects. Interpolating the real with the magnificently fake, Yassin imagines who Warhol’s local subjects might have been, and how the pop artist might have portrayed them. Yassin Haute Couture (2018), meanwhile, turns to the story of Yassin’s father, a fashion designer who worked in Saudi Arabia until his murder during the Lebanese Civil War. In series such as Playmate of the Month, Princess of Oblivion and Proposal for a Proposal, the artist imagines the embroidery patterns his dad might have designed by looking at old family photographs and the pages of Playboy magazine. By extending his work into fantastic yet delicate terrain, Yassin offers a fleeting glimpse of the stinging absence otherwise well-protected by his deflective sense of humour.
—Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
