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

Such specificity of description and ludicrous focus on invented trivialities are all elements of Raad's strategy of reformulating history through multiple deployments of mundane detail. While slyly slipping in accurate information about Lebanon's wartime political factions and alliances, he also uses this tale to poke fun at the potential for mistakes and outright corruption that can cloud historical reporting. "As far as I know," he said, "there were no historians who went to the track and bet on the horse races, but this was the way that I could make sense of these real horse race photos. I invented Dr. Fakhouri as the source of these documents because artists are not allowed to write history--they need the authority of a credentialed historian. I also was interested in the relationship between history and time displacements and the notion that what we think of as experience is by no means settled. Like hysterical symptoms, the events depicted are not attached to memories of actual events but to fantasies (mine and others') erected on the basis of memories." (5)

Displacement of one kind or another--the embrace of documents at some remove from the action itself, invention of imagined characters, evidence supporting mistaken notions, memories rooted in fantasy--underlies much of Raad's work. Looking for raw material in popular media, Raad developed Secrets in the Opera. Sea (1999), a series of photo-collages that indirectly explore the psychological mechanism of substitution for loss. Here, variously shaded blue panels, of a generous 4-by-6-foot size visually related to color-field paintings, seem, at first glance, to be totally abstract. But they prove not to be paintings at all. Rather, they are large sheets of exposed photographic paper with tiny 1/2-by-3/4-inch black-and-white portrait photographs neatly positioned in the bottom right hand corners of their white borders.

Although these rich blue panels are visually seductive, they would not field their meaning without Raad's accompanying wall text, which presents them as having been excavated in 1992 from beneath the rubble of the postwar demolition of Beirut's ravaged commercial districts. Correspondingly, Raad's fiction was inspired by digging beneath facts, in this case the appearance in early 1990s Lebanese newspapers of scores of tiny black-and-white group-portrait photographs. Intrigued by the publishing of portraits so small that no individual could be recognized, Raad invented an explanation that involved sending the blue sheets to a French laboratory whose fictive technical analysis retrieved grainy photos that appeared as "latent" images embedded within the blue fields. While the photos Raad used actually had been accompanied in the newspaper by captions identifying the subjects as, say, attendees at an annual meeting of the board of directors of the Gillette corporation, in Raad's narrative, research "revealed" them to have been anonymous men and women who drowned or were found dead in the Mediterranean during the period of the wars.