Foreword to the Arabic edition, 2019

For an exhibition at the V-A-C Foundation in Venice in 2019, I proposed to build museum wall prototypes modeled after walls from the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. On my walls, I also placed fly-fishing flies. I accompanied my walls with the following text:

These walls are on their way to Lebanon. They are an anonymous gift to the soon to-be-built Beirut Museum of Art. The following instructions accompany the gift: Please stand these walls in the museum months before the building’s opening. This may ensure their attracting the artworks befitting us.

Letters to the reader

While visiting the recently opened museum of modern Arab art in Beirut, I noticed with great surprise that most paintings on display had no shadows.
At first I was beside myself, convinced that religious zealots had destroyed the shadows.  But no umbraclast came forward.
I then pondered whether the museum's walls had been painted with a white so white that shadow is cast on them.  
​But I suppose I should have known all along that the shadows were not destroyed nor invisible: they had simply lost interest in the walls where they were made to hang.

I decided to build new walls on which I carved shadow-like forms—magnets of sorts—in the hope they’d attract the restless shadows.

Thus far, not a single catch.