Flirtations with evidence: the factual and the spurious consort in the works of The Atlas Group/Walid Raad. Using the conventions of information-based art, Raad questions the reliability of documentation in general. His projects, which take as their theme the protracted political instability of the Middle East, range in tone from satirical to elegiac

Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Janet A. Kaplan

The fact that people tend to flirt only with serious things--madness, disaster, other people--and the fact that flirting is a pleasure makes it a relationship, a way of doing things, worth considering.... Flirts are dangerous because they have a different way of believing in the Real Thing. And by 'believing in' I mean 'behaving as if it exists.... There is always another story, one we haven't necessarily bargained for

--Adam Phillips, On Flirtation, 1994

At the intersections of past and present, where does one look for he evidence that becomes history? Which stories are told, and who gets to tell them? What authority do photographs and archives carry? The artist known as The Atlas Group/Walid Raad addresses these questions in an ongoing body of photo-based work that engages a complex range of flirtations with visual and textual evidence.

A fictional collective under whose rubric much of the work is presented, The Atlas Group is one of the frameworks Raad has developed for addressing how evidence is used to conjure the beliefs that become history. On the one hand, The Atlas Group is real--a foundation with twin archives in New York and Beirut and a mission to gather, preserve and produce materials related to modern Lebanon, Raad's birthplace, and, more specifically, to the Lebanese civil wars that were fought between various religious, ethnic and political factions between 1975 and 1991. (1) On the other hand, The Atlas Group as an artists' collective is a construct, one that serves Raad in several ways. The guise of collectivity is a humorous nod to contemporary theory's critique of singular authorship. Yet it also confers on Raad's work the gravitas of an institution. And the contradictions inherent in the work of a "group" that is really done by one individual underscore the problematic conjunction of fact and fiction that is a central strategy in much of his work, which he presents in various public forms including mixed-medium installations, single-channel screenings and lecture/performances.

In Raad's photo-text series "I Only Wish That I Could Weep" (2001), a fictional character, Operator #17, is presented as having been hired by Lebanese security forces to train a surveillance camera on La Corniche--the seaside boardwalk in West Beirut that has been a favorite meeting place of everyone from political pundits and intellectuals to prostitutes, fortune-tellers and double agents. Each evening, however, Operator #17 is said to have turned his camera away from the strollers and redirected it toward the sun setting over the water--a sight that had been off-limits for those confined to the east side of the divided Beirut during the civil wars. Thus Raad invents a narrative for a series of video stills of simple sunsets marked by reddish skies that darken as the sun sinks below the horizon.

Raad's operator chose to turn the eye of evidence-gathering away from its official target. By addressing the volatile spectacle of the Middle East and Lebanon's civil wars through what we might otherwise conclude are unremarkable tourist photos, Raad similarly directs our attention away from the grand gestures and cataclysmic events that are the expected subjects of war documentation. Enacting a flirtation with the real, he invents fictions that hover near facts, offering alternative sources for the "evidence" that becomes history. As Raad explained in a recent interview, "The geopolitical history of contemporary Lebanon that was being written [in the years since the wars ended] was leaving out so much of what I considered to be my experiences of these events. The mere ability to be able to walk freely from West to East Beirut unhindered by checkpoints is not an experience one would have had 15 years ago. I wanted to make documents that were conscious of that." (2)

Born in Chbanieh, Lebanon, in 1967, of mixed Lebanese and Palestinian parentage, Raad was raised in Christian-dominated East Beirut, a charged vantage point from which to see his country begin its spiral into civil war. "I wanted to be a photojournalist as a young teenager. I would go to the front lines, take pictures, get caught a couple of times and go through horrendoas questioning because the photograph was seen as a form of intelligence." (3) In time, Raad came to appreciate that photographs could yield cultural truths well beyond the details of military information.

Leaving Lebanon at the age of 15 as the situation for young men became increasingly dangerous, Raad immigrated to the U.S., where he eventually earned an MFA in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in visual and cultural studies from the University of Rochester. Drawing upon this training, Raad has developed a method that combines the theoretical study of the nature of the archive and memory with the material practice of making and gathering photographs. Presented in densely layered installations, his work interweaves video, Internet content, performance, collage, digital photography and prose in English, French and Arabic. Combining images collected from popular media such as newspapers and magazines with narratives that he concocts to explain their possible meanings, he explores the manipulation of evidence, the politicization of looking, the mutability of history and the authority ascribed to knowledge production, with special consideration of photography's effect on how modern Arab history can be understood.