Walid Raad is a conceptual artist and professor of art at The Cooper Union. Perhaps best known for his 14-year project on the contemporary history of Lebanon, The Atlas Group, Raad works across media and disciplines to examine the connections between politics, violence, and cultural narratives. His work has been shown around the world, including at the Venice Biennale, Istanbul Biennial, and Documenta, as well as in solo exhibitions at the Louvre, MoMA, Stedelijk Museum, ICA Boston, and Whitechapel Art Gallery.

Artist Walid Raad presents a series of (occasionally, but rarely) lovingly crafted birthday cakes for some of the world's most toxic and/or bigger-than-life leaders.

The Story

I started to fantasize about poisoning the cake, but just could not go through with it. My cowardice got me thinking about all the adored and/or despised world leaders, and their birthday cakes

About the Project

About the Artist

Curatorial Statement

Festival of Gratitude

Vladimir Putin

Ronald Reagan

Robert Mugabe

Recep Erdoğan

Saddam Hussein

Mustafa Kamal Atatürk

Viktor Orbán

Mao Zedong

Muammar Gaddafi

Hugo Chávez

Alexander Lukashenko

Ayatollah Khomeini

Margaret Thatcher

Benjamin Netanyahu

Hafez al-Assad

Francisco Franco

Omar al-Bashir

Hosni Mubarak

Distribution

Details

Each cake led to the creation of a number of slices. The number corresponds to the abhorred and/or revered leader's age as of 2022.

9-10 AM ET

10-1 PM ET

1 PM ET

November 9th, 2023

Artist Walid Raad presents a series of (occasionally, but rarely) lovingly crafted birthday cakes for some of the world's most toxic and/or bigger-than-life leaders.

Each cake led to the creation of a number of slices. The number corresponds to the abhorred and/or revered leader's age as of 2022.

The slices are individuated by the historical or mythological poisons or elixirs they are said to contain. The poisons include Anthrax, Ergot, Mercury, and Ricin, among others. The elixirs include Rapamycin, Heavy Water, and Golden Apple, among others.

Gift a "poisoned" slice to someone you love or hate. Gift an "elixired" slice to someone you cherish or scorn. 

Long life and early death: For some a blessing. For others, a curse.

Proceeds from Festival of Gratitude benefit ArtEast and other non-profit cultural organizations selected by Walid Raad. ArtEast is a leading New York-based nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging a growing global audience with the contemporary arts of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). 60% of primary sale proceeds and 60% of resale royalties (6% of the total resale price) are donated to ArtEast and other non-profit cultural organizations.

The Story of Festival of Gratitude as told by Walid Raad

Contract Addresses

Curatorial Statement from Nato Thompson

Abdullah of Saudi Arabia

Yasser Arafat

“As a teenager growing up in Beirut,” explains Raad, “my favorite pastry shop was Noura. It is still there today. I adored their Mango tartes, but just could not afford them. So, I hatched a plan. What if I offered my budding photographic skills to the owner, in exchange for tartes...text 1 

“My plan worked, and I got the job, and worked day and night, picturing all the cakes and tartes I fancied. That is until the day that I came to photograph a bunny-shaped birthday cake for Amine. It all of a sudden dawned on me that Amine may be the divisive President of Lebanon, Amine Gemayel. This President was renowned for his bunny-fetish, and sweet-tooth...

“I started to fantasize about poisoning the cake, but just could not go through with it. My cowardice got me thinking about all the adored and/or despised world leaders, and their birthday cakes.”

This is a test slide for the scroller issue. 

As a teenager growing up in Beirut, my favorite pastry shop was Noura. It is still there today. I adored their Mango tarts, but just could not afford them. So, I hatched a plan. What if I offered my budding photographic skills to the owner in exchange for tarts?

My plan worked. I got the job, and worked day and night, picturing all the cakes and tarts I fancied. That is, until the day that I came to photograph a bunny-shaped birthday cake for Amine. All of a sudden it dawned on me that ‘Amine’ may be the divisive President of Lebanon, Amine Gemayel, who was known for his bunny fetish and sweet tooth. 

I started to fantasize about poisoning the cake, but just could not go through with it. My cowardice got me thinking about all the adored and/or despised world leaders, and their birthday cakes.

Long life and early death: For some a blessing. For others, a curse.



Sixty percent of primary sales will go to nonprofit organizations selected by Walid Raad to benefit from the project. The artist and nonprofits will each receive five percent of all secondary sales on platforms that support creator royalties.

Festival of Gratitude uses two contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. All cake and slice NFTs are tied to one of these two contracts.

0xc41beE7fbD1179beeA76183138d5cE69480f3B99

0xc316E173EeD7a8B49B0A39904432Da6dD022c359

Walid Raad is an artist and professor of art at The Cooper Union. Perhaps best known for his 14-year project on the contemporary history of Lebanon, The Atlas Group, Raad works across media and disciplines to examine the connections between politics, violence, and cultural narratives.

“Festival of Gratitude” presents a series of birthday cakes for world rulers actively engaged in a narcissistic expansion of their will—which, predictably, comes at the expense of democracy in most instances. They are confections for strongmen (and women) enraptured with their own power whose shadows loom large over headlines, lives, and the everyday minutia of the global politic. Why celebrate these tyrants?

The 21st century has ushered in a renewed age of the autocrat. The globalism and neoliberalism that shaped the ‘90s and the aughts has given way to national leader as mobster boss, crime lord, grifter. Sparking the anger of the working class, deploying racial epithets and harkening to myths of cultural nationalism, these leaders, when considered in aggregate, represent a trend more than a singular diabolical impulse.

For artist Walid Raad, the project takes its cue from an early memory of Beirut. As an aspiring teenaged photographer, he frequently snapped birthday cakes at his favorite bakery. As he documented cake after sumptuous cake, he realized that the names inscribed in viscous icing were as likely to be those of the military, political, and other thuggish leaders who were in the midst of laying waste to the city as part of the ongoing wars, as they were to be of his friends from school, his cousins or neighbors. He began to fantasize about the cakes going out to warlords as poisoned.

The image of a dictator with their birthday cake says much about these attention-hungry leaders. We can easily imagine that these hoarders of power love their cakes baroque and gigantic. They demand decorative twists and turns. And of course, they must have a party every year, even after they’re gone. The cutting of the cake reminds us of childhood birthday parties, or ostentatious adult ceremonies, both of which align with the psychic needs of these larger-than-life personalities.

These works are most certainly dark and cynical (in the sense of sneering fault-finder). Cakes for Lukashenko, Mubarak, Thatcher, Reagan, Mugabe, and Putin? The list is long, and one irony is that the cakes land differently depending on your political orientation; Many on the left still adore Chavez and Arafat just as some on the right still revere Reagan, Thatcher and Netanyahu.

In addition to these model confections, Raad offers individual slices, either “poisoned” or “blessed.” More than the intact emblems of the insatiable appetites of the ruler, slices provide a chance for those at the party to share in the moment—for better or worse. They are distributed, much like the scene in Godfather II where Hymon Roth hands out slices of birthday cake in Havana to the gathered captains, all the while describing how the mob’s holdings will be carved up after his reign. Or, the selling of slices are like the divvying up of the imaginary “King Cake” of the art market’s never-ending Mardis Gras.

The greatest irony of Festival of Gratitude lies deep inside the cake. Each one utilizes a Non-Fungible Token, or NFT, that contractually establishes a specific circulation of money with each sale. For the Putin cake, 100% of proceeds go to Ukraine artists and activists. For all other cakes and projects, 60% of proceeds go to an arts-based non-profit organization chosen by the artist. In this way, a project that foregrounds the grandiosity and excesses of despots also helps build a different kind of art world that literally pays every time a work is sold and re-sold, and in this case, supports arts organizations in need at a higher rate than individual artists. Not to sugarcoat it, the NFT-as-philanthropy thumbs its nose at autocracies in all their forms.

And for that, we’re willing to eat cake.

Festival of Gratitude

From the Collection

Walid Raad

The Story