Raed Yassin is a visual artist and musician (Double Bass, Turntables and electronics) hailing from Beirut. He is one of the organizers of IRTIJAL festival there and runs the Annihaya music label. He is involved in numerous projects ranging from textural improv to turntablism to post-punk and pop.

He works with image, music, text and conceptually, exploring themes related to the media, the city, Arabic cinema, pop culture, disasters, and archives. His work was shown across Europe, the Middle East, the United States, and Japan.

For his two day residency at OTO Yassin will be joined by both younger and more established players from London's vibrant improvised music community.

Thursday 6th January 2011

Eddie Prevost : percussion
Ute Kanngeisser : cello
Paul Abbot : electronics
Seymour Wright : alto saxophone
Sebastian Lexer : piano (+computer)
Raed Yassin : double bass

Friday 7th January 2011

John Butcher : sax
John Edwards : double bass
Raed Yassin : double bass



Raed Yassin approaches narratives of personal and/or collective history, identity and place through the lens of consumer culture and mass production. A long-time aficionado and collector of all things pop in the Middle East, especially Egyptian blockbuster movies and popular music, to Yassin it is the collective cinematic and musical memory shared among the people in the Middle East – and by corollary the nostalgia the latter evokes – which provide him with a gateway to sensibilities on a local level. In his work an engagement with the materiality of the media, its time-based qualities, and subsequently its glitches, influence aesthetics and concept heavily.

Yassin’s most recent projects flirt with the thin line between historical truth and fiction, and the ramifications for subjectivity on an individual and collective level. Increasingly, the artist scripts himself in his work, as a performative persona, but also as a commodity within consumer culture and the contemporary art world. A cunning and subtle humour infuses Yassin’s practice on a variety of registers. This vernacular, which fluctuates between the popular and street cred, does not reveal itself instantly, but operates in-between the realms of fact and fabrication, and thus constructs its own reality.

Dusted Magazine review of 'The New Album'
Dusted Magazine review of Raed Yassin/Gene Coleman 'The Adventures of Nabil Fawzi'

In collaboration with The Delfina Foundation

The Delfina Foundation is an independent, non-political arts organisation, which facilitates exchange and dialogue between artists and curators in the UK and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) through a programme artistic residencies and related public events.