Walid Raad develops manuals for rescue operations. Rescue operations? For whom? For arrested artworks and their shadows, the latter lost or amputated due to involuntary confinements. We see rescue operations for lost or missing paintings, for injured angels, for artworks gone nuts, for falsely reassembled sculptures, architectural maquettes – sometimes even for people who have gone missing, dictators and political leaders included. Raad’s labyrinths are sliding language operations. All those names and titles, all those grammatical declinations, repeats, erring deviations, slippages of dates, meandering titles together with the evidence of objects and documents form a protective shield by which Raad provides safe passage for endangered artworks and their shadows.
Wars, the artist explains, have the power to damage artworks in ways that even colours, shapes and motifs are affected – not by direct impact but, more ominously by the occupiers’ grip, which turns them into doppelgänger trophies. Just as smugglers or lovers use subterranean tunnels for escape, colours, shapes and motifs may “hide, take refuge, hibernate, camouflage, and/or dissimulate” in places where one would least expect them. Out of the blue, they turn up “out of nowhere” – on pallets used for international shipping, on business cards, footnotes, or on the backs of paintings stored in warehouses for far too long.
—Almut Sh. Bruckstein. For Walid Raad
