Book Launch: Saloua Raouda Choucair by Riet Wijnen

Sunday, August 9, 2–4pm

Please join us for the Los Angeles launch of Saloua Raouda Choucair, an alternative monograph by Amsterdam-based artist Riet Wijnen, co-published by JOAN’s Autograph Press, Kunstverein Publishing, and Page Not Found.

The afternoon will feature a collective reading from the book’s lexicon by invited guests including Riet Wijnen, Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, Shana Lutker, Lara Salmon, Samar Al Summary, Sasha Ussef, and Alexia Veytia-Rubio, followed by a celebration.

The event will also mark the closing of Ulises Carrión, a bookwork in many places, offering visitors a final opportunity to experience the exhibition alongside the book launch.

Copies of the publication will be available for purchase at JOAN during the launch and later through our website.

Following the Los Angeles launch, the publication will also be celebrated in New York at Wendy's Subway in Bushwick on Tuesday, August 18, with Riet Wijnen, Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, Rachel Valinsky, Suzy Halajian, Sarah Riggs, and additional guests. More information coming soon!

Rather than a conventional monograph, Saloua Raouda Choucair offers a multifaceted approach to the life and work of the pioneering Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair (1916–2017). The publication begins with more than 170 photographs made by Choucair herself documenting her own work, which Riet Wijnen uncovered through research in the artist’s archive in Lebanon. The second half unfolds as an expansive lexicon of words closely connected to Choucair's practice—including DNA, Dual, Water, Equation, Mu'allaqāt, Salt and Pepper Shaker, Abstraction, and Clay and Ceramic.

Artists, designers, poets, biologists, hackers, musicians, technicians, translators, writers, and mathematicians were invited to contribute personal definitions of these terms, reflecting on how each resonates within their own practice rather than interpreting Choucair’s work directly. For each word, multiple entries by different contributors open the publication to multiple perspectives, inviting readers to encounter Choucair's practice through intersecting disciplines, geographies, cultural contexts, and generations.

Saloua Raouda Choucair is edited by Riet Wijnen with Yana Foqué and Suzy Halajian, and designed by Marc Hollenstein. The 236-page publication measures 215 × 200 × 18 mm.

Contributors include: Noor Abed, Etel Adnan, Adonis, Maria Barnas, Jeroen Boomgaard, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Seamus Cater, Soraya de Chadarevian, Jeon Hwan Cho, Sarah Crowner, Rasha Dakkak, Patricia Fernández, Karen François, Nikita Gale, E. Bruce Goldstein, Anja Groten, Cathy Park Hong, Iman Issa, Donghwan Kam, Katrin König, Diederik Koppelmans, Stephan Kuderna, Kim Lim, Jungmyung Lee, Audre Lorde, Shana Lutker, Sven Lütticken, George Mahashe, Dmitri Mendeleev, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Abdias Nascimento, Hussein Nassereddine, sidony o'neal, Pauline Oliveros, Other Indias, Marianne Peijnenburg, Falke Pisano, Laure Prouvost, Alexander Provan, Koleka Putuma, Patricia Reed, Sarah Riggs, Luiz Roque, Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, Aram Saroyan, Harold Schimmel, Hala Schoukair, Lucy Skaer, slvi.e, Gertrude Stein, Syafiatudina, Arie Syarifuddin, Rayyane Tabet, Điềm Phùng Thị, Jalal Toufic, Rachel Valinsky, Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, Rosmarie Waldrop, Riet Wijnen, Geo Wyeth, and Ala Younis.

Riet Wijnen (b. 1988, Venray, the Netherlands) is an Amsterdam-based artist whose practice spans sculpture, photograms, publications, text, and type design. Her work explores incomplete histories of abstraction through research into overlooked artists, thinkers, and cultural figures, often bringing them together in speculative conversations that reconsider the past and imagine new futures. Wijnen is the author of several publications on language and modernism, including Saloua Raouda Choucair, Homophone Dictionary, Grace Crowley, and Marlow Moss. She has exhibited internationally at venues including SculptureCenter, New York; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; Casco Art Institute, Utrecht; Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; and P/////AKT and Lumen Travo, Amsterdam, and teaches at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague.