Karaoke Exhibition

Karaoke is a highly personal yet at the same time fictional rendition of the artist’s own life and family history. Yassin borrows filmic material, celebrity stories and pop imagery mainly from Egyptian cinema, which he deliberately and directly interweaves with personal narratives, obscuring the lines between fact and fiction. Surprisingly, reality becomes magically solidified through the use of these seemingly distant mass-produced images. The real is imagined through the unreal language of cinema, opening the doors to a deeper investigation of truth. The familiarity of nostalgic media - VHS, Polaroids, and neon signs among others - heightens the emotional response to these stirring stories. The result is a feedback loop: media artifacts constantly redefine and modulate the very structures and workings of the familial and the personal, which in turn tamper with the contradictions of the collective unconscious evoked through the impersonal yet specific memories of these cinematic visions. As his first solo exhibition in Germany, Raed Yassin’s Karaoke compels us to ponder the fragility of the family as an institution, and how to boldly reclaim territories of personal loss through consummate imagination.


Exhibition views - Akademie der Künste der Welt - photos by Alfred Jansen