Walid Raad
Two Drops per Heartbeat
In Two Drops per Heartbeat, dynamic, razor-sharp, and “incisive” (The New York Times) Lebanese-American multimedia artist Walid Raad imagines and narrates several encounters with strange artifacts—among them a Persian carpet, images of clouds, gold and silver medieval cups, and depictions of American swamps and marshes.
In this US premiere presentation, Raad juxtaposes his own works with objects from Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, disentangling their histories and their strangeness—only to find ever more complex stories within.
The result is a dense web of narratives that intriguingly and intuitively links the history of the collections with the political, economic, and social history of the modern world: from slavery and racism in North America to the Cold War and the trouble spots of our present day; from weather forecasting technologies to the Hudson River School to the realm of the undeath.
Raad works across installation, performance, video, and photography to explore how historical events of physical and psychological violence affect bodies, minds, art, and tradition. He is well-known for The Atlas Group, a 14-year project about the contemporary history of Lebanon.
He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Moderna Galerija (Ljubljana), Kunsthaus Zürich (Switzerland), Kunsthalle Mainz (Germany), and is featured in the collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the Centre Pompidou (Paris), among others. In addition, Raad is professor of photography at Bard College.
After the Saturday performance, all attendees are invited to stick around for an artist talkback and a discussion about future histories with Walid Raad hosted by Jad Abumrad. Abumrad is a radio host, composer, and producer, and the creator of the public radio program and podcast Radiolab.
Two Drops per Heartbeat is a version of Cotton Under My Feet, adapted for a single space. See the Cotton Under My Feet trailer from a presentation in Zurich below.
Walid Raad _ Bio: In part, an artist and a Professor of Photography at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA). The list of exhibitions (good, bad and mediocre ones); awards and grants (merited, not merited, grateful for, rejected and/or returned); education (some of it thought-provoking; some of it, less so); publications (I am fond of some of my books, but more so of the books of Jalal Toufic. You can find his here: jalaltoufic.com), can be found somewhere online.
Jad Abumrad is a radio host, composer, and producer, and the creator of the public radio program and podcast Radiolab. His podcasts have been downloaded over 1 billion times. He is a MacArthur fellow, a four-time Peabody Award winner, and is currently a Distinguished Professor of Research at Vanderbilt University.
