Walid Raad's Scratching on Things at the Louvre

Walid Raad (b. 1967, lives in New York) presented the first of three installments of his ongoing work Scratching on Things I Could Disavow at the Musée du Louvre from January 19 to April 8, 2013. The project coincided with the opening of the museum's Islamic art galleries and was produced at the Louvre's invitation. Raad, known for The Atlas Group—an encyclopedic project on Lebanon's wars—proposes that cultural facts in post-traumatic societies (a term borrowed from Jalal Toufic) are impossible to grasp due to dramatized contexts, particularly within Muslim world cultures affected by the Gulf Wars and the Arab Spring. The installation in the Salle de la Maquette featured suspended architectural elements evoking a reverie on a flat world, accompanied by a video projection of Islamic art objects selected because they will be loaned from the Louvre-Paris to the future Louvre-Abu Dhabi. A second component takes the form of an artist's book with photographs of the same objects distorted. Raad suggests that under certain conditions, humans can only experience the world by transforming its substance, because reality is inadmissible.