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

While Raad often combines fact with fiction, his goal is not to trick or dissemble. In a frequently presented lecture/performance titled The Loudest Muttering Is Over, delivered in a formal academic style complete with lectern, microphone and water glass as well as staged technical difficulties and the occasional planted audience member who asks scripted questions, Raad is quick to introduce Atlas Group projects with an explanatory disclaimer. "While some of the documents, stories and individuals being presented are real, in the sense that they exist in the historical world, others are imaginary in the sense that I imagine and produce them. But all the material I present is informed by research in audio, visual, and print archives in Lebanon and elsewhere." In response to audience complaints of betrayal on learning of the fictional aspects of these highly believable presentations, Rand emphasizes that this methodology is intended to demonstrate that history is unstable, and that the elements of which it is constructed are malleable, fungible and open to interpretive invention. As he said to several increasingly annoyed listeners at a Middle Eastern Studios Association gathering at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York, in September 2002, "The Atlas Group proceeds with the consideration that the Lebanese Wars are an abstraction. One troubling question is: Under what notion of facts can we operate in our construction of 'the history of' the history of Lebanon? How do we approach the fact of the war?" (4)

One approach for Raad has been to turn to unexpected sources with which to capture war's more elusive aspects. For example, photos of a weekly Beirut horse race published in the Lebanese daily newspaper Annahar provoked his photo-collage series "The Missing Lebanese Wars" (1996). Fascinated to see that the photos never quite captured the precise instant of victory, Raad built an absurdist narrative to account for the pictures that involves a group of "respected historians who were, it is said, also compulsive gamblers." Meeting every Sunday at the racetrack, they were reported to have convinced or bribed the track photographer to snap only one picture as the winning horse arrived. As Raad described it, "The Marxists and the Islamics bet on races I through 7, the Maronite Christian Nationalists and Socialists on 8 through 15," each wagering on precisely how many fractions of a second before or after the horse crossed the finish line the photographer would expose the frame. Each page in the series (which is credited in The Atlas Group archive to the notebooks of "the famous Lebanese historian, Dr. Fadl Fakhouri") includes the photograph clipped from the Monday (post-race-day) edition of the newspaper crudely taped onto greenish lined paper roughly torn from a steno pad and marked with myriad penciled details: notations about the race's distance and duration, the winning time, calculations of averages, the historians' respective bets, the predicted time discrepancies and short descriptions of the winning historian--fat, bald, prone to drink, etc.