• Wed 13 05 – Sat 13 06 2015 •
Karaoke Raed Yassin

An event in the frame of PLURIVERSALE II.
Venue: Academyspace, Herwarthstraße 3, 50672 Cologne

Wed 13 5 2015 – Sat 13 6 2015
Karaoke, Exhibition

Tue 12 5 2015
Opening of the exhibiton and ACADEMYSPACE
19:00

Fr 15 5 2015
19:00
RAED YASSIN
On Art, Performance and Good Cooking
Artist talk with Raed Yassin and Ekaterina Degot
20:00
The Raed Yassin CookSongBook performed by UTE WASSERMANN
Performance

Sun 17 5 2015
Museumsfest: Karaoke and Soup

Thu 4 6 2015
19:00
RABIH BEAINI / RAED YASSIN DUO, Concert

Fri 5 6 2015
19:00
RAED YASSIN & THOMAS BURKHALTER
The Politics of Sound in Beirut, Talk

Wed 13 5 2015 – Sat 13 6 2015
Karaoke
Exhibition
Opening hours:
Wed – Fri 14:00-18:00
Sat 12:00-18:00
Sun 17 5 2015 15:00-18:00

Tue 12 5 2015
Opening of the exhibiton and ACADEMYSPACE

Where is father? Every night, a family gathers in front of the TV to raise the same question, hoping to catch a glimpse of him hiding in the glamorous world of the Egyptian film industry. They will not find him, but see him in dreams through images of stars. Raed Yassin, a Beirut-born artist and musician, is haunted by Middle Eastern pop culture from the 1960s up to today, with its stand-up comedy, belly dancing, and films. Among other works, the exhibition premieres Yassin’s new video installation Karaoke (2015), a meditation on the burning shame felt by a child in the face of artistic failure. Yassin’s semi-fictitious, sad/funny stories are always about longing, embarrassment, and false hope, but equally about history’s deep unfairness towards the self-colonized periphery, unjustly represented as backwards and imitative.

Fri 15 5 2015
19:00
RAED YASSIN
On Art, Performance and Good Cooking
Artist talk with Raed Yassin and Ekaterina Degot
20:00
The Raed Yassin CookSongBook performed by UTE WASSERMANN Performance
10 €, reduced: 8 €

How do you sing a fruit soup? Or asparagus? Lentils might be especially challenging. Ute Wassermann sings, whistles, and produces virtuosic, nondescript sounds for Raed Yassin CookSongBook, a project by the visual artist and musician Raed Yassin (first performed by Ute Wassermann at Café Oto/London in 2014). A cookbook and songbook at once, it contains recipes that are rendered as graphic scores to be sung by a solo female vocalist. Yassin loves both food and music, and understands both as socially conditioned communication devices, rather than perfect masterpieces isolated in ivory towers – although, more people would probably agree to that in relation to asparagus than to music.

Sun 17 5 2015
Museumsfest: Karaoke and Soup
15:00-18.00
Fruit Soup from The Raed Yassin CookSongBook
15.00
Guided tour with RAED YASSIN (in English)
16:30
Guided tour (in German)
Free admission

Thu 4 6 2015
19:00
RABIH BEAINI / RAED YASSIN DUO
Konzert
10 €, reduced: 8 €

How do you melt a double bass? Raed Yassin uses a modified instrument, metal objects, sheets of paper, and various devices to explore unorthodox and alternative ways of delivering massive sounding walls of noise, drone, metallic sounds, and undefined grooves. Meanwhile, musician Rabih Beaini passes the sounds through filters and LFO modules, breaking up Yassin’s sound into resonances and driving the frequencies with analog time dividers to recreate a totally new rhythmic pattern, and effecting non-linear divisions of time. The result is a session of large, spaced-out rhythms and patterns of sound, with melodic exploitations and abstract layers.

Fri 5 6 2015
19:00
RAED YASSIN & THOMAS BURKHALTER
The Politics of Sound in Beirut, Talk

How does art respond to times of political turmoil and war? Artists have different ways of dealing with this question. For some, conditions of conflict lead directly to activism and intervention, be it with artistic or non-artistic means. For others, on the contrary, the point is to concentrate on nothing but art. The musical ethnologist, journalist and founder of the global music platform Norient.com Thomas Burkhalter will discuss this tense relation with Raed Yassin, exploring his multi-facetted practices and experiences in the Lebanese context of war, political crisis and uncertain futures.