The Best Of Sammy Clark

2009 | Installation | Variable dimensions

The Best of Sammy Clark reflects on the possibilities and limitations of the “tribute”, and the negotiations between the personal and the collective. The work operates within a retroactive framework as opposed to a nostalgic one, paying homage to Lebanese pop culture icon Sammy Clark through an active fabrication of the past in the present. Yassin’s work consists of a series of gestures whose aim is to perturb the normalized pairing of lived experience and its forms of documentation. Primarily, it seeks to redesign the constellations around the family photograph. Patriotic discourses and signed album covers become the starting points for a form of reconciliation, as displaced and disfigured objects fill the room: 4 turntables simultaneously playing a different Sammy Clark LP each, a series of framed digitally manipulated photographs in which Sammy Clark appears to entertain the Yassin family during a birthday party, framed vintage album covers, and a text that (seemingly) holds the entire piece together. Imagination begins to intercept and complicate Yassin’s childhood memories, drawing an inviting audiovisual world that seems both genuine and counterfeit at the same time. Songs become muddled, voices and tunes once familiar become indiscernible, lost in a setting where memory is artifact.


Exhibition views - Delfina Foundation 2010 - photos by Christa Holka