WALID RAAD, Sweet Talks
WALID RAAD
Sweet Talks
November, 5th - February, 19th
hamburg
Better be watching the clouds
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Better be watching the clouds, 2017
Attributed date: 1992
Attributed to: Fadwa Hassoun
The following plates were donated in 1992 to The Atlas Group by Fadwa Hassoun, a retired officer in the Lebanese Army. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Lebanon’s Deuxième Bureau code-named local and international political and military leaders in the language of local flora. As a trained botanist, Hassoun’s job was to assign the code names to the leaders. Hassoun kept track of all code names in a logbook where she collaged faces of the leaders onto flowers and trees. The plant’s name became the politician’s code name. As such, Hosni Mubarak became Dwarf Mallow; Mikhail Gorbachev, Purple Carline; Ronald Reagan, Kermes Oak; And Kamal Joumblatt, Pink Sorrell.
Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut)
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Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut), 1987/2019
These plates are from a book I found in a flea market in Beirut in 1994. It consisted of streetscapes of the city by an unsung Lebanese photographer, Ahmed Helou. What also drew me to the book were the hand-written inscriptions in Arabic on each spread, diary-like entries, most likely written by the book’s previous owner.