Festival of Gratitude: Muammar Gaddafi
2022 - NFT (NFT)
00:16 minutes
Walid Raad
For his first NFT release artist Walid Raad made a series of animated birthday cakes, titled Festival of Gratitude , for some of the world’s most toxic and larger-than-life leaders. The series of looping three-dimensional animated videos are only seconds long—a timespan familiar to gif and online meme culture—and feature global dictators, strongmen and strongwomen, kings and queens, princes and princesses, emirs, sheikhs and sheikhas, sultans, shahs, emperors and empresses, popes, ayatollahs, presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, and GOATs. The subject of cakes has a specific personal meaning for Raad, whose first job as an adolescent was photographing pastries at a bakery in Beirut. It’s unclear if the cake is implicitly celebrating the passing of Gaddafi, reminding us of his long reign, or performing the gaudy fanfare befitting a dictator. For this particular work, Festival of Gratitude: Muammar Gaddafi , the artist features Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, the Libyan military officer, revolutionary, and finally a brutal dictator of Libya from 1969 to 2011. This NFT was minted during what would’ve been Gaddafi’s 80th year, if he hadn’t been apprehended and killed by Misrata fighters while fleeing Sirte, Gaddafi’s hometown, on October 20, 2011. The series Festival of Gratitude was produced by Artwrld.
Walid Raad is a Lebanese artist whose work investigates the way historical events of physical and psychological violence affect bodies, minds, culture, and memory. Spanning across photography, video, installation and performance, Raad’s practice critically addresses biases of representation and story-telling in historical discourses and narratives, especially in a Middle-Eastern context. His works have been concerned with historical omissions and unaddressed narratives in relation to the political and socio-economic realities that structure contemporary Lebanon and the other countries from the region. In 1989, he notably founded the Atlas Group to research and document the recent history of Lebanon, with the emphasised aim to shed light on and confront alternative narratives to the coverage and documentation of the 1975 and 1990 Lebanese wars.
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