2020 Edition
Winner Raed Yassin
The jury unanimously awarded the first edition of the Tosetti Value Award for photography to Raed Yassin, presented by Isabelle van den Eynde, because his work crosses different disciplines using the medium of photography to merge his personal history with collective memory. Appropriating cinema, music and pop culture in his work, the artist rewrites the history of the Middle-East through his personal lens both as an artist who has lived and grown in Beirut and someone actively engaged in the interpretation and dissemination of art as an intimate and performative social practice.
In his 2013 series Dancing, Smoking, Kissing, Raed Yassin literally reproduces the visual fabric of his childhood memories in a series of silk thread embroideries as Family Portrait with Peacock, which became part of the Family office’s collection. He takes the viewer on a pictorial walk down memory lane, bringing together the mental images of his childhood with their photographic representations that disappeared due to the diaspora of the Lebanese people following the civil war in Lebanon. Born into a family of tailors, Raed Yassin sets out to reconstruct these vanished and abandoned images on factory-made silk fabrics, on which his reminiscences, those of his family members, and the holes and gaps in his memory are computer-embroidered.
Jury
- Joerg Bader, Director Centre de la Photographie de Genève, Ginevra
- Walter Guadagnini, Director CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, Torino
- Francesco Jodice, artist and teacher NABA – Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milano
- Giovanna Silva, artist and editorial directorHumboldt Books, Milano
- Giulia Tosetti, Tosetti Value for Art Manager and CEO of Promemoria Family
In collaboration with Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde (Dubai)
