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Raed Yassin’s photographic mixed-media series “Warhol of Arabia” is featured in the 61st Venice Biennale’s main exhibition, “In Minor Keys.” Anchored in Andy Warhol’s documented 1977 visit to Kuwait, the works imagine social scenes from the trip; Yassin describes them as fiction rather than a reconstruction of confirmed events.
Raed Yassin’s “Warhol of Arabia”, a series of photographic mixed-media works imagining Andy Warhol’s 1977 visit to Kuwait, is included in the main exhibition of the 61st Venice Biennale, “In Minor Keys.” The exhibition revisits a documented trip through invented scenes, using Pop Art imagery to explore how the Gulf country’s cultural life might have looked during an oil-driven period of rapid change.
Warhol visited Kuwait in January 1977, after accepting an invitation from the country’s national arts council. He spent a week attending social gatherings and held a solo exhibition at Salat Al Funoon gallery, showing portraits of Mao Zedong and Marilyn Monroe alongside flower prints. These details provide the historical anchor for Yassin’s project; the scenes in his artworks are not presented as documentary records of specific gatherings.
Created between 2016 and 2018, the series places Warhol in imagined social settings, as though a fly on the wall were observing his visit. In “The Party XII,” he appears on the floor between a sheikh and a woman wearing a kaftan. Yassin colors Warhol’s hair pink and his glasses yellow while leaving the other figures in a different visual register, marking the artist as an outsider within the scene.
Another work, “The Exhibition XIII,” combines a photograph of Warhol with his Campbell’s soup-can multiples and adds four primary-colored headscarves. The intervention alters the familiar Western Pop imagery rather than simply reproducing it. The works are displayed at the Biennale, with the installation credited to Yassin and Gallery Isabelle, Dubai.
Reframing Warhol’s Gulf Visit
The series brings a little-known episode in Warhol’s career into a major international art exhibition while shifting attention from the artist’s familiar images to the setting in which he presented them. It connects his visit to Kuwait’s cultural scene and the region’s oil-era transformation, without claiming to offer a historical account of every social encounter depicted.
Yassin’s approach also makes the gap between an archival event and later imagination part of the subject. Warhol’s presence and exhibition in Kuwait are the historical basis; the gatherings and compositions in the artworks are artistic inventions. That distinction matters for viewers interpreting the images as art rather than evidence about what occurred behind closed doors.
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Warhol’s 1977 Kuwait Exhibition
Warhol arrived in Kuwait during a period when an oil boom had brought new wealth and closer connections to Western cultural exports, according to the source report. The report also describes Warhol as facing pressure to find new markets as interest from some domestic patrons waned amid his high asking prices. His Kuwait exhibition thus sits at the intersection of an artist’s commercial search and a country’s growing engagement with international art.
Yassin told Hyperallergic that he was interested in what lay beyond familiar accounts of the Gulf focused on oil and industry. His works use the verified visit as a starting point, but their imagined scenes reflect his own artistic interpretation of a period he describes as poorly understood culturally.
““The Gulf region in the 70s was kind of a black hole. No one knew what was going on, especially culturally.””
— Raed Yassin, speaking to Hyperallergic
Where History Meets Invention
The source material does not establish that the specific parties or interactions shown in Yassin’s works took place as depicted. The series is described as fiction built around a real visit, and the report does not identify the models or the historical basis, if any, for individual figures beyond Warhol’s documented trip and exhibition.
The available account also does not give further details about the Biennale’s dates, the works’ full installation schedule, or whether additional archival evidence about Warhol’s week in Kuwait is being presented alongside the series. Those points are not confirmed in the source material.
The Series at Venice
“Warhol of Arabia” is presented as part of “In Minor Keys,” the main exhibition at the 61st Venice Biennale. The source report identifies the series and its installation but does not announce a later venue, further exhibition dates, or a related publication. Any plans beyond its Biennale presentation remain unconfirmed.
For now, the works invite audiences to consider both the documented outline of Warhol’s Kuwait visit and the imaginative choices Yassin makes around it. The distinction between those two layers remains central to how the project should be read.
Key Questions
What is “Warhol of Arabia”?
It is a series of photographic mixed-media works by Raed Yassin, made between 2016 and 2018, that imagines scenes around Andy Warhol’s 1977 visit to Kuwait.
Where is the series being shown?
The series is included in “In Minor Keys,” the main exhibition of the 61st Venice Biennale.
Did Warhol visit Kuwait in 1977?
Yes. The source report says Warhol visited in January 1977 at the invitation of Kuwait’s national arts council and held a solo exhibition at Salat Al Funoon gallery.
Are the scenes in Yassin’s works historically documented?
Not as depicted in the source material. The works are described as fictional scenes anchored in a real visit; Yassin called them his imagination of the period.
Source: hyperallergic.com
