Curated by Jean-Marc Prévost, Andrea Viliani, and Alessandro Rabottini

“Preface,” Walid Raad’s first major exhibition in a French museum, conjoins the refined research the artist has conducted as the Atlas Group (regarding the real and representational violence of Lebanese civil wars) and Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, his ongoing investigation, begun in 2007, into the suspiciously vigorous appearance of Arab modernism in global art institutions. On display will be new Atlas Group works that give form—that of the assassinated body—to Raad’s prior preoccupations with the abstractly pictorial regimes evidenced in his photographs of car bombings and bullet-scarred buildings. Such an avowedly embodied focus complements the documentary reach of Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, which marks the artist’s pursuit of what artist Jalal Toufic has characterized as the immaterial effects of disaster on cultural inheritance. Imaginative to the end, the exhibition eschews a catalogue in favor of a quadrilingual artist’s book.

Travels to the Museo MADRE, Naples, Oct. 2014–Jan. 2015.

— Hannah Feldman