Like a rubber rung on a ladder: Walid Raad

With Like a rubber rung on a ladder, Galerie Thomas Schulte presents a solo exhibition by Walid Raad in its street-facing Corner Space and adjacent Window Space. The two installations, which largely consist of fragmentary and composited wall-based elements, activate and visually connect interior and exterior.

As in much of Raad’s practice, his artworks engage the stories and forms made possible by events of extreme violence.  These stories and forms are always a blend of the personal and collective, the found and the created. His long term art project, The Atlas Group(1989 - 2004) explored the history of car bombs in the Lebanese wars, kidnapping and captivity narratives, the renaming of Lebanese waterfalls, as well as the color coding of bullets by ammunition manufacturers, among others.

Better be watching the clouds again and again sprawls over two adjacent walls in the front window space. Though it may appear cheerful at first glance, its title hints at something ominous, an attempt to catch the unpredictable, a potential warning. The scattered flowers of different species and all varieties of color, with their own symbolic and geographic affiliations and displacements, form a landscape in bloom that slowly gives way to deeper ambiguity. The flowers frame the faces of dozens of black-and-white figures dressed in formal or military attire—highlighting and obscuring the presence of global political and military leaders of the last century. One narrative that has been associated with iterations of this work concerns Fadwa Hassoun, a fictional officer in the Lebanese Army trained as a botanist, who, during the war—an ongoing point of departure in Raad’s practice – assigned flowers as code names to politicians.

These identities, both doubled and concealed, are devoid of further context or indication. The colorless photographs, ostensibly belonging to the past yet enduring, contrast with the vibrancy and fragility of the flowers—fully alive, fully present. The photomontaged figures hover before the wall, casting varied shadows that create a gap, opening a space. Further shadows are inserted into the image, between head and flower, flower and body, adding an imaginary dimension that contributes to a heightened realism, while emphasizing a constructed nature. In juxtaposition with the flowers that disguise and subsume them, the politicians’ bodies become a kind of shadow themselves.

The installation in the Corner Space is similarly colorful and enlivened, as bursts of handwriting, like celebratory fireworks, at turns playful and threatening, are graffitied onto the walls. Through these apparently ephemeral, marginal gestures, Festival of (In)Gratitude: Love Notes bringsthe gallery’s interior to meet the external facades of the street outside. The writings in various scripts and languages, including English, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, and French, disrupt and overlay one another. Referencing soldiers’ graffiti on bombs, the chaotic, layered inscriptions stage aggressive demonstrations of nationalist, imperialist, and violent sentiment that may slyly appear otherwise at times: signed with hearts and “xoxo”, with mention of gifts. In the embattled landscape contained within the frame of the gallery’s windows, bombs are simulated (“Boom, Boom”)—shouting loudly through an echoing silence. A central element within the installation is an overturned vintage Volkswagen Beetle—flipped on its back like a helpless insect, as though by excessive, explosive force. Cars and their engines have appeared elsewhere in Raad’s work in the context of war, engaging, for example, with the history of the car bomb during the Lebanese Wars. Here, the VW Beetle may also point to other references: its production as a military vehicle in Nazi Germany; its pop-cultural status as the “Love Bug”; the moniker “flying Volkswagens” given to the heavy artillery shells fired by the U.S. on Beirut in the 1980s.

Again and again in Raad’s work, a singular moment or reference is stretched, transformed and mutated through overlaps, gaps, and palimpsest. Here, 1983 Beirut folds into 2026 Beirut, Tehran, Gaza City, Tel Aviv, the Western Front, and the Eastern Front; the historical world into the natural world; “Run Rommel Run” into “America Loves Israel.” How can we not be “out of breath yet”?

Text by Julianne Cordray

With special thanks to Sfeir-Semler Gallery for their kind cooperation.