Walker Art Center Presents Artist Rayyane Tabet's First US Museum Commission

Trained as both an architect and a sculptor, artist Rayyane Tabet (b. 1983, Ashqout, Lebanon; lives and works in Beirut and San Francisco) investigates peculiarities of the built environment through multifaceted installations that play with the perception of physical and temporal distance. Weaving together personal stories with official accounts, Tabet’s works often provide another lens with which to view the past as well as its unexpected connections to the present.

For his first commission at a US museum, Tabet has created a new installation focused on the intersections of architecture, design, and technology. The artist’s research began with a site visit to a former IBM manufacturing facility designed in 1956 by architect Eero Saarinen in Rochester, Minnesota. From there, he unraveled a web of curious connections within the history of the company that includes Saarinen, architect Edward Larrabee Barnes (who designed the Walker’s 1971 building), and designers Paul Rand and Charles and Ray Eames. Informed by this research, the exhibition will include a multipart sculptural and sound installation and expand beyond the space of the gallery via a site-specific architectural intervention.

In an echo of the famous two-toned blue IBM Rochester building, Tabet will transform a 60-foot-long wall of glass windows into a transparent blue landscape— superimposing Saarinen’s patterned design onto the Walker’s façade. The gallery, bathed in a cycle of blue light, will feature decommissioned IBM Eames chairs suspended from the ceiling in a kind-of memory theater. A sound piece, performed by an artificial intelligence trained through machine learning, mirrors the modulations of the artist’s voice. Ultimately, Tabet creates a probing space that blurs the boundaries between questions of dematerialization, identity, and objecthood.