Gallery Artists

Walid Raad
Work

Les Louvres: Sections 7, 11 and 17, 2019

For two years, between 2010 and 2012, I was an artist in residence in the Louvre in Paris. I was documenting the building of the Louvre’s newest and eighth department, Le Département des art de l’Islam as well as the building of another Louvre in Abu Dhabi.

The videos below proceed from official Louvre footage I accessed during my residency in Paris. The stories I recount are informed by my various encounters in Paris and Abu Dhabi.

Section 7, (In a Restoration and Conservation Workshop, Paris), Section 11, (In a tunnel under the Paris Louvre), Section 17 (The Louvre), 2019, Video, color, and sound, 18mins 31s, Excerpt

Preface to the third edition: Acknowledgments, 2014-2019

Of the 18,000 objects held in the collection of the Paris Louvre’s Département des Arts de l’Islam, nine were sent to Louvre Abu Dhabi for the museum’s 2017 opening. By the time they landed in Abu Dhabi, the objects had undergone two distinctive physical transformations: each object’s “face” had shifted to another’s, and the affected objects curiously lacked shadows.

With the opening approaching and at a loss about the bizarre situation, the museum’s conservator decided to paint fake shadows next to each object. Remarkably, the fake shadows somehow brought forth the real ones.

As for the swapping of the objects’ faces, it remains unsolved.

Here, I display the objects on walls I designed with their real and prosthetic shadows.