Courtesy Raed Yassin.
| Dates: | 11 January 2011 – 18 February 2011 |
| Venue: | Delfina Foundation |
Delfina Foundation presents The Best of Sammy Clark (2008) a tribute by artist Raed Yassin to his fictive mentor, the eponymous Lebanese pop culture icon, and a contrived genealogy, which links the artist to the 1980s singer.
The installation features 4 turntables simultaneously playing a different Sammy Clark LP, placed at the centre of a vivid pink and green room. A group of frames contain a series of digitally manipulated photographs, in which Sammy Clark appears to entertain the Yassin family, during a birthday party. A text indicates that these objects are the only remains after an explosion that destroyed the Yassin family apartment during the Lebanese civil war.
The installation points at a representational rift between the lived experience and the normativity of its conventional forms of documentation (be it the family photograph or the news report), which Yassin addresses by inserting imagined memories to complete the ‘real’ story. The resulting narrative is openly personal, subjective, and navigates the thin line between historical truth and fiction. The Best of Sammy Clark contemplates the erosion of memory and of narrative possibilities and explores the limitations of the artist’s memory apparatus through the lens of consumer culture and popular music.
Public programme: Sonic Grounds
To complement Raed Yassin’s exhibition, Delfina Foundation resident Rayya Badran curates a series of events, performances and screenings which further explore the intersection between popular music, radio and writing.
Sonic Grounds aims to unpack some of the underlying topics and thoughts that emanate from Raed Yassin’s contextual work on music and video by expanding the discussion to a number of UK-based practitioners, with view to yield different interpretations and readings to sampling, popular culture and the politics of aurality. The series of talks also attempts to extrapolate experiences of listening between the cities of London and Beirut to seek potential moments of dissonance or resonance.
Events
Video screening: Featuring Mahmoud Yassin
Wednesday 12 January, 18:00-20:00
Evening of screenings followed by a conversation between Raed Yassin and Rayya Badran
The Aural Contract Audio Archive Evening
Tuesday 1 February 2011, 19:00-20:30
Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a London-based artist and writer. He will present a live listening session, part of his ongoing and growing audio archive, in which the audience takes part in a listening experience that aims to unpack “the politics of sound and the conditions of voice”.
[Watch event recording]
Surface Noise: Hauntology and the Metaphysics of Crackle
Wednesday 9 February 2011, 19:00-20:30
Mark Fisher, famous blogger (k-punk), writer and theorist, will take us through this notion of hauntology in contemporary music and film.
[Watch event recording]