Proposal for a Proposal

Proposal for a Proposal
Raed Yassin
2018
Silk embroidery on canvas print
50 × 70cm
Yassin Haute Couture
Venice Biennale, Arsenale International, 61st edition, Italy

This year, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to Italy to attend the 61st edition of the Venice Biennale. The lineup this year was full of talented artists, some making their debut, while others were returning. Among these amazing artists was Raed Yassin (b. 1979), a Lebanese artist currently based in both Berlin and Beirut. While his works were spread across both venues, it was his collection exhibited in the international section of Arsenale that intrigued me: a small collection of multimedia photographs dedicated to his father, entitled Yassin Haute Couture.

This specific collection attempts to reconstruct the life of Raed’s father. A fashion designer in Beirut, Samir Yassin was tragically murdered during the Lebanese Civil War before Raed could turn five. In exploring this idea of loss, love, and grief, Yassin poses an interesting question: Can you truly lose someone you hardly ever knew? Yassin Haute Couture is not an exploration of the life of Raed’s father; rather, it is an acknowledgement of the impossibility of ever being able to get to know him. Raed admits that the research that he conducted to create these works ultimately results in conjecture. He states that he “[used] fragments of rumors collected from long-lost relatives, [...] to build a dramaturgy of obsessions that mirror his own, as if inherited from father to son.” Yassin admits that he will never fully be able to know his father; however, using fragments of the legacy his father left behind, Yassin builds an image of the person he imagines him to have been.

Yassin imagines his father's life by modifying photographs taken from a diverse range of sources, from family pictures to vintage Playboy images. He uses various media, such as embroidery, pen, and paint, to recreate the designs that his father might have created. I find this technique particularly interesting when considering the details of the relationship between Yassin and his father. Although the people in the photographs are real, the reconstructed designs very clearly stand out. In Proposal for a Proposal, for example, he uses embroidery that literally pops out of the image, immediately drawing the viewer's eye to the garments. This creates a distinct tension between what is real and what is imagined, mirroring the fragmented details Yassin knows about his father.

In the end, this collection serves a distinct purpose: to imagine a person Yassin never truly met; an ode to a father he barely knew, constructed from the fragments he left behind.