Raed Yassin’s A Feeling in Perspective

Show view of Raed Yassin's A Feeling in Perspective. Courtesy of Gallery IVDE
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There are only two days left to catch Raed Yassin’s solo exhibition in Dubai. Here I have written a small account of my experience with the show and the artist. I encourage you to take some time out to visit the gallery in Alserkal Avenue to check it out for yourself.

When I walked in to Raed Yassin’s exhibition at Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde, I was drawn instantly by the brightly coloured textile pieces and neon signs.

At first look it seems like a light, easy-going art show but then, looking further and getting into the grit of it, I realised I was being let into a highly personal part of the artist’s life. It was like he was revealing an inner secret.

The neon signs on the wall read the words ‘embarrassment’ and ‘déjà vu’ and the embroidered images portray scenes that purport to be from his family photo album. His real photos were lost in the Lebanese Civil War when the artist and his family had to flee. On the far wall of the gallery are still scenes from Egyptian films that have been cropped and, again, titled as captions from photo albums of his childhood – ‘the neighbour’s dog’, ‘Dad with his new car’. They are generic enough to be from anyone’s memories, so force some personal reflection.

“In general I like to play with different types of perspective of understanding,” explains Yassin. “I focus on the development of Arabic pop culture and especially the cinematic Arab image and music from Egypt. I look at its effects on society and how it plays with unconscious and reconstructs our memories. I embed my own stories within it but I also work a lot with fiction.”

So then, I wonder, if this is just a story within a story of it is a personal memory or, if indeed, that is the point.

The video work, Karaoke, which shows grainy footage of a young singer as well as Yassin’s own mother in the latter stages of her life, tells a story through subtitles of a moment of embarrassment that Yassin felt as a child and although he wanted to tell his mother, he didn’t tell her before she died. The video is achingly poignant with memory and loss but again, does not appear so at first glance.

“I don’t like to speak about memory being separate from unconscious. Memory is vague and foggy and that is what is interesting to me, what stays behind is the most important, that is not the reality but what it means to us.”

So, the exhibition is about truth, fiction, memory and most importantly, the hazy space in between.

* Raed Yassin: A Feeling in Perspective runs until tomorrow at Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde. www.ivde.net