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

These pictures of groups of men who had gathered to look at the aftermath of a ear bombing are another aspect of Raad's larger project of examining the ways in which media images are always, by definition, at some remove from the events they are presumed to document. Seeking yet other ways to re-present the history of the Lebanese wars, Raad turned his attention here not to what "happened" but to what people look at in trying to make sense of what happened. Raad's emphasis is on the multiple layers involved in the very act of looking itself. Just as he chose news photographs that focus on people looking at the ensuing damage, he echoed this visual remove by directing our looking, as viewers of his images, to the photographer's looking ... at people looking.

"My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair" is intended to eventually include photographic prints, actual cars and car engines, notebooks, videotapes, texts, mixed-medium installation and performance. Raad intends to build an archive of substitutes for what has been lost by collecting photographs of cars currently found on the streets of Beirut that match each exploded car. With hoped-fur donations of replacements from manufacturers (so far he has received only one, a Fiat), he plans to expand the project to include an installation of engines with cars hanging overhead. Like a macabre madeleine (Proust is among his favorite authors), each engine will serve as a memory trigger--gruesome and fascinating, exploded then silenced.

The subtlety of Raad's approach is brought home most movingly in a work that carries profound contemporary resonance. Miraculous Beginnings (2000) is a series of film stills credited to Raad's fictive historian, Dr. Fakhouri. Described in The Atlas Group archive as a wanderer in the streets of Beirut, Fakhouri is said to have exposed a frame of film "every time he thought the wars had come to an end." In fact, the resulting images of apartment buildings and shuttered storefronts are poetic traces made by Raad himself. Roaming through Beirut during the frequent return visits he makes each year, he regularly pursues the photographic practices that are at the heart of all his projects. (10)

Once again the focus is on looking--this time for evidence of what cannot be known, but only hoped for. Such obsessional marking of repeated frustration and uncertainty surely invokes the long years of Lebanon's civil wars. But it is also deeply evocative of the flirtations with elusive evidence that marks our condition of post-9/11 "endless war." Take a photo each time you think it is over. Add it to the archive of the unknowable and the longed for. In the context of our current geopolitical agony, Miraculous Beginnings reads as Walid Raad's most poignant work.

Many thanks to Moira Ruth for valuable counsel.

(1.) Raad has variously stated that The Atlas Group was founded in 1967, 1976 and 1991. He has also spelled his last name with and without an apostrophe. See interview with Raad by Man Gilbert, "Walid Ra'ad," Bomb, Fall 2002, no. 81, pp. 38-45.