Ghost Karaoke

Karaoke is predominantly a game for adults. Because the pleasure for those who take part in it lies not only in testing their singing skills, but also in remembering the recent or distant past inevitably brought to mind by musical classics.

Memory is the leitmotif in this exhibition, starting with the work that provided the title and sets the overall tone: Karaoke. Raed Yassin made this short film in 2015 using fragments of old videos. Here, the artist recalls the time when he was still a child, and singing with his mother at religious festivals near Beirut, Lebanon. When he hit the wrong note, the audience laughed at him, traumatising him to such an extent that he was unable to come to terms with it until he created this work, both a narrative and an elaboration of a past event.

Play, memory, tradition, family relationships and loss are interwoven in this first work and in the itinerary of the entire exhibition. It starts with Yassin’s individual experience and expands to include an in-depth analysis of the media we use to track those experiences. (Yassin often uses analogue video and photography precisely because of the physical quality of the signs they capture.)

Another video, Tonight (2008–2010), is a slow-moving portrait of a family intent on looking exclusively at the viewers. The most obvious peculiarity is the absence of a father figure (this is also a personal reference, as Yassin’s father was mysteriously murdered when the artist was still a child).

The Absent Album (2010–2015) is a series of 100 photographs whose only subject are scenes from Egyptian films. Yassin used this imagery to reconstruct a kind of retrospective photo album of his own family, since all the original images of him and his relatives were destroyed during the years of the Lebanese civil war. Polaroids, normally used to immortalize scenes of family life, here invariably reproduce the screen of a television set, calling into question the domestic character that usually defines this material.

The Company of Silver Spectres (2021–ongoing) is another work that follows the dispersal of Yassin’s entire collection of family photographs: in order to process this trauma, the artist has accumulated images belonging to other families over the years, and covers them with a veil of coloured paint, allowing only the silhouettes of the subjects to emerge. With a gesture that combines recovery and erasure, Yassin transforms hundreds of portraits into mysterious abstract works.

Finally, in The Sea Between My Soul (2020), Raed Yassin’s individual memories become collective ones. In a performance video that blends rock, musicals and theatre of the absurd, the Mediterranean Sea is treated as the backdrop to a tragedy involving the whole of humanity. Taxidermied animals are the only players in a narrative that turns in on itself. Play remains the only (illusory) way out in an endless tunnel between the grotesque and the irrational.