Raed Yassin Invents Warhol's Lost Week in Kuwait at Venice Biennale

In January 1977, Andy Warhol skipped Jimmy Carter's inauguration to attend tea parties and dinners in Kuwait for a week — and now, at the 61st Venice Biennale, that trip has become art. Lebanese artist Raed Yassin's photographic mixed-media series "Warhol of Arabia" (2016–2018) anchors his presence in the main exhibition In Minor Keys, curated by Koyo Kouoh, at the Central Pavilion through November 22.

Let's be clear about what this is. The Kuwait trip happened. The rest is fiction — knowingly, proudly fiction.

What actually happened in 1977?

Kuwait's national arts council invited Warhol, and he held a solo show at the Salat Al Funoon gallery featuring portraits of Mao Zedong and Marilyn Monroe plus an array of flower prints. The context was bluntly commercial. Warhol's star was fading at home, with fewer patrons willing to meet his high asking prices, and he needed new markets. Kuwait, freshly flush with oil money and tethered to Western cultural exports, had interested buyers.

Yassin stages scenes from that week as a fly on the wall. In "The Party XII," Warhol sits on the floor between a sheikh and a stylish kaftaned woman; only Warhol is painted in color — pink hair, yellow glasses — marking him as the outsider. "The Exhibition XIII" stamps four primary-colored headscarves onto a photo of Warhol with his Campbell's soup can multiples, tampering with the super-Western imagery he favored.

"The Gulf region in the 70s was kind of a black hole. No one knew what was going on, especially culturally," Yassin told Hyperallergic. "You hear about oil and that kind of industry, but I was interested in what was beyond, what was happening in society. This is my imagination of it, which creates a different world entirely."

Where did the fiction come from?

Berlin- and Beirut-based Yassin discovered the trip during a residency in Amsterdam, where he met Farida Al Sultan, director of the Sultan Gallery. Her older siblings opened Kuwait's first art gallery in 1969. She recalls champagne toasts and "a row of Marilyns" hanging in the house of Sheikh Mubarak Fahad Al Salem Al Sabah.

"There were poetry readings all the time, and the arts council was very active then," she recounted in 2010. "Kuwait was the place to be."

But archives have limits. Rumors in the Sultan Gallery files suggested Warhol made silkscreen portraits of Kuwaiti royals, celebrities, even their pets. Yassin found no documentation confirming any of it. So he fabricated the theoretical commissions — copycat Warhols of a woman in bright red eyeshadow and green lipstick, keffiyehs in plain primary colors — superimposed onto copies of real images from the exhibition opening.

He also took textual liberties. "His opening was a pompous affair," Yassin wrote in an accompanying text. "People were clamoring to have a photo taken with him." Probably fair.

Why trust the artist over the diary?

Warhol's own diaries offer little romance. He fastidiously recorded the prices of coffee, laundry, and soap, and jotted: "Spent time looking for antiques, but there are none in Kuwait — just a few old pots from a couple of years ago. We were the only foreigners in the marketplace."

"I came to the conclusion that he was a stranger, an alien, someone out of context… His reason for being there was totally commercial," Yassin said. The color he added to the afterparty photos deliberately frames Warhol as a passing attraction.

The work's relationship to memory is personal, too. Also on view at the Biennale is Yassin's 2018 series "Yassin Haute Couture," where staged portraits and neon signage probe the truth about his father — a famous fashion designer in 1970s Beirut who was murdered, in Yassin's words, "in mysterious ways." Yassin describes the Kuwait project as reaching for "a forgotten past — what was once glamorous and now is gone. A so-called golden era."

Some questions will never be answered. Did Warhol have political conversations? Was there tension under the surface? "These women would not want to be seen in photos without the veil now," Yassin noted — a reminder of how much the record has shifted. Having grown up in Lebanon in the 1980s, where pop culture was "a way to run away, to feel what was going on in the world besides the war," Yassin builds a version of reality in which art can change history. Whether it does remains an open question — one this installation seems content to leave hanging.