Raed Yassin’s exhibition “Warhol of Arabia” reimagines the pop artist’s 1977 visit to the Gulf country and a bygone era in the Middle East.
VENICE — In January 1977, Andy Warhol skipped President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration to spend a week attending tea parties and dinners in Kuwait. He was invited by the country’s national arts council and held a solo exhibition at the Salat Al Funoon gallery, featuring portraits of Mao Zedong and Marilyn Monroe and an array of flower prints. Domestically, his star was fading; with fewer patrons willing to meet his high asking prices, Warhol was under pressure to enter new markets. In Kuwait, where the recent oil boom had brought an influx of cash and a tether to the West and its cultural exports, he found more than a few interested buyers.
Nearly 50 years later, contemporary artist Raed Yassin has mounted a selection of photographic mixed-media works for the 61st Venice Biennale’s main exhibition, In Minor Keys, inventing scenes from that trip from the perspective of a fly on the wall.
“Warhol of Arabia” (all works 2016–2018) uses a real event as its anchor to paint a rich fiction using Pop aesthetics. In “The Party XII,” Warhol is depicted on the floor between a sheikh and a stylish kaftaned woman; Yassin painted only Warhol in color, making his hair pink and his glasses yellow, marking him as an outsider. “The Exhibition XIII” stamps four primary-colored headscarves onto a photo of Warhol with his Campbell’s soup can multiples, modifying the super-Western imagery the artist typically favored.
“The Gulf region in the 70s was kind of a black hole. No one knew what was going on, especially culturally,” Yassin told Hyperallergic. “You hear about oil and that kind of industry, but I was interested in what was beyond, what was happening in society. This is my imagination of it, which creates a different world entirely.”