Walid Raad, finalist for 2010 Hugo Boss Prize
NEW YORK – Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to announce that Walid Raad has been named a finalist for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation's 2010 Hugo Boss Prize. Walid Raad has been chosen as one of six finalists, who include Cao Fei, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Roman Ondak, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Walid Raad’s work explores the experiences and representations of war through video, photography and performance. He is well-known for The Atlas Group, a 14-year project about the contemporary history of Lebanon. The collection of documents archived by Raad presents a fictional universe where the hysterical symptoms of the Lebanese wars are preserved and scrutinized. In the words of a recent critic, the works "function not as emblems of fact or scraps of evidence to support the assertions of history, but rather as traces, as symptoms, as strange structural links between history, memory, and fantasy."1
There will be an exhibition of Raad’s ongoing project titled Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World at the Paula Cooper Gallery from 6 November through 12 December 2009. Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World explores the recent emergence in the Arab world of a new infrastructure for the visual arts comprising arts festivals, workshops, fairs, biennales, museums, galleries, funds, schools, journals and collections, among others. These developments, when viewed alongside the geo-political, economic, social, and military conflicts that have consumed the region in the past few decades, form a rich and knotty ground for creative work. Raad’s exhibition presents forms and stories made possible by this ground.
Raad was born in Chbanieh, Lebanon, in 1967. His work has been exhibited in prominent national and international exhibitions. Most recently, his work was the subject of “The Atlas Group: A Project by Walid Raad,” a one-person show at the Photo Espana 2009 at the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid. Raad’s work has been presented at Documenta 11, Kassel (2002), Homeworks, Beirut (2005), the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennials, the 2003 Venice Biennale, the Kitchen, New York (2006) and the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2006). In 2007 Raad was awarded the Alpert Award, presented by CalArts, Los Angeles and in 2009 he was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
The prestigious Hugo Boss Prize, a biennial award, was established by Hugo Boss and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1996 to recognize significant achievement in contemporary art. The Hugo Boss Prize is juried by a distinguished international panel of museum directors, curators and critics chaired by Nancy Spector, Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
The recipient of the Hugo Boss Prize will be announced in the fall of 2010. The winner will receive an award of $100,000, and the artist’s work will be presented in a solo exhibition in 2011 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Since its inception in 1996, the Hugo Boss Prize has been awarded to American artist Matthew Barney (1996), Scottish artist Douglas Gordon (1998), Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc (2000), French artist Pierre Huyghe (2002), Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija (2004), British artist Tacita Dean (2006), and Palestinian artist Emily Jacir (2008).
--------------1Kaelen Wilson-Goldie "Walid Raad: The Atlas Group Opens its Archives," Bidoun, issue 02, Fall 2004.
Artist Pages: Walid Raad