Walid Raad Better be watching the clouds May 18 – June 30, 2017 Paula Cooper Gallery 521 W 21st Street, NYC NEW YORK CITY | Paula Cooper Gallery has installed a new series of work by the Lebanon-born Conceptual artist Walid Raad entitled “Better be watching the clouds (2000/2017).” The presentation includes a selection of 15 plates from the series, on view from May 18 through June 30 at 521 West 21st Street. The plates in “Better be watching the clouds” show pages from a book of flora native to the Middle East where the heads of political leaders involved in, or contemporary with, the Lebanese Civil War appear as efflorescences. Its brightly colored blossoms budding with black and white photos of politicians recall the history of political critique and photomontage by artists such as Hannah Höch and John Heartfield. Raad’s index catalogs an extensive collection of players including Muammar Gaddafi (Libya) Margaret Thatcher (UK), Anwar Sadat (Egypt), Hosni Mubarak (Egypt), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Jimmy Carter (USA), Ronald Reagan (USA), François Mitterrand (France), Mikhail Gorbachev (Soviet Union), Yasser Arafat (Palestine), King Hussein of Jordan, Ayatollah Khomeini (Iran), Ali Khamenei (Iran), Menachem Begin (Israel), Yitzhak Shamir (Israel), Shafik Wazzan (Lebanon), Sheikh Zayed …
