Walid Raad showing and discussing his works at the Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg, Sweden, 2011
Born
1967
Education
Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Rochester,
Known for
Contemporary media
Walid Raad (Ra'ad) (Arabic: وليد رعد) (born 1967 in Chbanieh, Lebanon) is a contemporary media artist. The Atlas Group is a fictional collective, the work of which is produced by Walid Raad. He lives and works in New York, where he is currently a distinguished visiting professor of photography at Bard College, in addition to being a professor of photography at the Cooper Union School of Art.[1][2]
His works to date include film, photography, multimedia installations, and accompanying public performances. All, in one way or another, deal with the contemporary history of Lebanon with particular emphasis on the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–90. The work is also often concerned with the representation of traumatic events of collective historical dimensions; and the ways film, video, and photography function as documents of physical and psychological violence.[3] He is represented by Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg[4] and is also a member of the Arab Image Foundation.[5]
Walid Raad was born in 1967 in Christian East Beirut to a Palestinian mother and a Lebanese father. Raad's dream was to become a photojournalist. It was his father who gave him his first camera and helped to create a home darkroom. Since his teen years Raad has been introduced to the photographic medium as well as European photography magazines such as Photo, Zoom, and Photo Reporter, where he saw the work of Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Diane Arbus, and Helmut Newton.[6]
Ra'ad had to leave Beirut in 1983 and relocate to the United States. He received his BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1989, where he continued focused study of photography. In addition to that he also started taking classes in Middle Eastern studies.[7] He comments: "I never got to learn anything about the history of the Arab world, or the history of Lebanon in a serious way. That training was in the United States."[8] He went on to complete his MA and Ph.D. in Cultural and Visual Studies at the University of Rochester in 1993 and 1996, respectively. He completed a dissertation based partly on writing by American and European hostages held in Lebanon in the 1980s during the country's civil wars.[9] Working on the dissertation Raad had to encounter extensive work with archives and archival documents, as well as obtaining theoretical literacy, research and presentation skills to meet the demands of a PhD. Those skills Raad will employ throughout his artistic practice.
Raad's video works include Talaeen a Junuub (Up to the South) (Salloum/Raad, 60 min., 1993), I Think It Would Be Better If I Could Weep (6 min.18sec., 2000) a collection of video shorts titled The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs (Raad, 18 min., 1996–1999), and Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (Raad/Bachar), 18 min., 2000). Mixed-media projects include The Atlas Group: Documents from The Atlas Group Archive (1999 to the present), The Loudest Muttering Is Over: Documents from The Atlas Group Archive (2001 to the present), and My Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair (2004).ä
The artists is also a member of the Fondation Arabe pour l’image (FAI), founded in Beirut in 1996, which collects and exhibits photographic testimony from the Arab world. In this context Raad has co-curated with Akram Zaatari the exhibition titled Mapping Sitting: On portraiture and Photography, an investigation in Arab photography and its relationship to questions of identity.
In June 2009, "The Atlas Group (1989-2004)" exhibition opened at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Undertaken by Raad, the project aimed to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon, specifically the years between 1975 and 1991. The exhibition - consisting of installations, videos, and photographs - attempts to draw awareness to the various ways in which history is told, organized, and sometimes manipulated.[10] From this perspective The Atlas Group archive's fictional character makes it a kind of counter-archive to the FAI.[11]
In the late 1990s Raad created a fictional foundation called The Atlas Group in order to accommodate and contextualise his growing output of works documenting the Lebanese Civil Wars, generally dated 1975–1990.[13] Within Atlas Group Raad produces artworks, addressing the infrastructural, societal, and psychic devastation wrought by the wars, which he then re-dates and attributes to an array of invented figures who in turn are said to have donated these works directly or by proxy to The Atlas Group archive. Regardless of original medium of the documents, Raad processes and outputs all of his work digitally consciously adding another layer of documentary intervention to his overarching fictional conceit. Raad openly states the fictional dimension of the collective simultaneously applying complex methodology and performative dimension of Atlas Group presentation to blur the line between fiction and reality:"In different places and at different times I have called the Atlas Group an imaginary foundation, a foundation I established in 1976, and a foundation established in 1976 by Maha Traboulsi. In Lebanon in 1999, I stated, "The Atlas Group is a nonprofit foundation established in Beirut in 1967." In New York in 2000 and in Beirut in 2002, I stated, "The Atlas Group is an imaginary foundation that I established in 1999." I say different things at different times and in different places according to personal, historical, cultural, and political considerations with regard to the geographical location and my personal and professional relation with the audience and how much they know about the political, economic, and cultural histories of Lebanon, the wars in Lebanon, the Middle East, and contemporary art. I also always mention in exhibitions and lectures that the Atlas Group documents are ones that I produced and that I attribute to various imaginary individuals. But even this direct statement fails, in many instances, to make evident for readers or an audience the imaginary nature of the Atlas Group and its documents."[14]
Not the least important fact is the dual attribution of dates to all documents within archive: the first are attributions by The Atlas Group, while the second refer to Raad's production of the work. Artworks with only one date are not part of The Atlas Group's "official" archive. The Atlas Group is always presented by Raad through public lectures accompanying public display (film screenings, exhibitions displaying photography, audio, video and a variety of documents from the group's archives). Atlas Group and its digital archive are rooted in Raad's long-term investigation of historiography, archives and the effects of personal and collective trauma on memory and its articulation. Raad intentionally and explicitly employs fictional devices in approaching those themes.[15] For example, a number of core documents from the Atlas Group Archive, several notebooks, series of photographs, and 8-mm films are attributed to the estate of the (fictional) Lebanese historian, Dr. Fadl Fakhouri.[16] Within public presentations Raad, performing the representative of the Atlas Group, articulates the Lebanese Civil Wars as follows: "We do not consider "The Lebanese Civil War" to be a settled chronology of events, dates, personalities, massacres, invasions, but rather we also want to consider it as an abstraction constituted by various discourses, and, more importantly, by various modes of assimilating the data of the world."[17]
More recently, certain sections of the archive have been the object of a number of installations in museum spaces.[18]
Under the name of Atlas Group, Raad made a series of books published by Walther König: a sort of imaginary collection of Dr. Fakhouri's found notebooks reports on Lebanon's 15 year civil war. Atlas Group has been included in two Whitney Biennials in New York (2000 and 2002), Documenta 11in Kassel, Germany (2002) with the following year his work was included in the Venice Biennale. Raad's first solo exhibition in the United States was held in 2006 at the Kitchen, New York whereas his first solo show in Middle East has happened only 2 years later, at the Galerie Sfeir-Semler in Beirut.[19]
Raad is an organizer of Gulf Labor, a coalition of artists and activists organized to bring awareness to issues surrounding the living and working conditions on Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Island. In May 2015, he was denied entry to Dubai on grounds of "security".[20] In response, the international committee for Modern and contemporary art museums, CIMAM, issued a statement of support of Raad.[21] Shortly after, leading curators from institutions in Asia and India as well as Europe and North America – including Glenn Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art, Nicholas SerotaofTate, and Doryun Chong of M+ – signed an open letter calling on institutions in the West that are working in the Persian Gulf region – the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Musée du Louvre, among others – to help lift the travel bans imposed on Raad and Ashok Sukumaran.[22][23]
Raad's works have been exhibited at Documenta 11 (Kassel), The Venice Biennale (Venice), The Whitney Biennial (New York), The Ayloul Festival (Beirut, Lebanon), Home Works (curated by Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon) and numerous other festivals in Europe, the Middle East, and North America.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2023 Cotton Under My Feet: The Hamburg Chapter, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany
2022 We lived so well together, Kunsthalle Mainz, Germany
2021 Walid Raad.Cotton Under My Feet, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional, Madrid, Spain
2021 Walid Raad, Carré d’Art-Musée d’art contemporain, Chapelle des Jésuites, Nîmes, France
2021 Walid Raad: We can make rain but no one came to ask, La Maison des Arts Brussels, Belgium
2010 SweetTalk: Commissions (Beirut), Camera, Austria
2009 Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg, Germany[28]
2009 Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World _ Part I _ Volume 1 _ Chapter 1: Beirut (1992-2005), Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, USA
2009 The Atlas Group (1989-2004), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain
2009 Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World, Part 1_Volume 1_Chapter 1, (Beirut: 1992–2005),REDCAT, Los Angeles, USA
2008 A History of Modern and Contemporary Arab Art: Part I_Chapter 1: Beirut (1992-2005), Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon[29]
2008 I might die before I get a rifle, Kunstverein Heidelberg, Germany
2008 We Can Make Rain But No One Came To Ask, David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Rhode Island, USA
2007 We Decided to Let Them Say "We are Convinced" Twice (It was More Convincing this Way), Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, USA
2007 The Atlas Group (1989-2004): A Project by Walid Raad, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico-City, Mexico
2007 The Atlas Group (1989-2004: A Project by Walid Raad), Culturgest, Lisboa, Portugal
2006 The Atlas Group (1989-2004): A Project by Walid Raad, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany
2006 The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs: Documents from The Atlas Group Archive, The Kitchen, New York, USA
2006 We Can Make It Rain But No One Came To Ask: Documents from The Atlas Group Archive, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
2006 We Decided to Let Them Say "We are Convinced" Twice (It was More Convincing this Way), Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, USA
2005 I Was Overcome With a Momentary Panic, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
2005 Funny, How Thin The Line Is: Documents from The Atlas Group Archive, FACT, Liverpool, UK
2004 My Neck is Thinner Than a Hair: Engines, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg, Germany
2004 I was Overcome with a Momentary Panic, AGYU, York University, Toronto
2004 The Truth Will Be Known, Prefix Institute, Toronto
2004 The Truth Will Be Known, Krannert Art Museum, Illinois, USA
2003 The Truth Will Be Known, La Galerie, Noisy-le-Sec, France
2003 The Truth Will Be Known, World Wide Video Festival, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Selected Group Exhibitions
2024
A Model, MUDAM, Luxembourg
2023
So it appears, Institute for Contemporary Art, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, USA
TOP SECRET: Cine y Espionage, CAIXA Forum, Barcelona, Spain
TOP SECRET: Cine y Espionage, CAIXA Forum, Madrid, Spain
Moving Images in the Arab World, Art Explora Festival Photo Pavillon, Various stops across the Mediterranean region, Marseille, France (forthcoming)
2022
Think We Must – düsseldorf photo + Biennale for Visual and Sonic Media, Akademie-Galerie – Die Neue Sammlung, Düsseldorf, Germany
Based on a True Story. . ., Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, United States
Give and Take. Bilder über Bilder. 8. Triennale der Photographie 2022 – Currency, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany
Homosphäre, Kunsthalle Mainz, Germany
Temporary Atlas: Mapping the Self in the Art of Today, MOSTYN, Wales, United Kingdom
Flowers Forever. Flowers in Art and Culture, Kunsthalle München, Munich, Germany
2021
Enjoy - die mumok Sammlung im Wandel, mumok, Wien, Austria
ARTIST'S LIBRARY: 1989-2021, MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, Italy
2020
A sun yellow with anger, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg, Germany[31]
Faces: a Look at the Other, Carré d’Art, Nîmes, France
A Bottomless Silence, Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, New York, USA
2019
Home Is a Foreign Place, The Met Breuer, New York, USA
Time, Forward!, V-A-C Zattere, Dorsoduro, Venice, Italy
Konkrete Gegenwart, Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland
2018
Possibilites for a Non-Alienated Life, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India
Camera Austria International. Laboratory for Photography and Theory, Camera Austria, Mönchsberg, Austria
Revolution Generations, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar
SHINE ON ME. We and the sun, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden, Germany
Truth is black, write over it with a mirage’s light, Darat al Funun, Amman, Jordan
Acts of Translation, Mohammad and Mahera Abu Ghazaleh Foundation, Amman, Jordan
The Dictionary of Evil, Gangwon International Biennale, South Korea
Ausstellen des Ausstellens, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany
Statues Also Die, Fondazione Museo delle Antichità Egizie di Torino, Italy
Mobile Worlds On the Migration of Things in Transcultural Societies Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Germany
General Rehearsal: A Show in three acts from the collections of V-A-C, MMOMA and KADIST, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, Russia
2017
Mario Merz Award Shortlist (with Suha Traboulsi), Fondazione Merz, Turin, Italy
What We Know that We Don't Know, Kadist, San Francisco, USA
The Principe of Uncertainty, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea
Ways of Seeing, ARTER, Istanbul, Turkey
Home Beirut. Sounding the Neighbors, MAXXI Rome, Italy
Many Tongues: Art, Language, and Revolution in the Middle East and South Asia, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA
The Truth of Uncertainty: Moving Image Works from the Hall Collection, Schloss Derneburg Museum, Derneburg, Germany
A Thousand Roaring Beasts: Display Devices for a Critical Modernity, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Seville, Spain
Field Guide, Remai Modern Museum, Saskatoon, Canada
Hämatli & Patrice, MUSEION of Modern and Contemporary Art Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy
Manipulate the World, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden
2016
Nothing but blue skies, Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, France
The Eighth Climate (What does art do?), 11th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea
Question the Wall Itself, Walker Arts Center, Minnesota, USA
Transcultural Flux, TrAP, Oslo, Norway
WITNESS, Kent Fine Art, New York, USA
The Sun Placed in the Abyss, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio, USA
Centennial Exhibition: The Arts Club of Chicago at 100, Arts Club of Chicago, Illinois, USA
Nothing but blue skies, Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, France
Those that are near. Those that are far, with Situ Studio, Stommeln Synagogue, Pulheim, Germany
Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol; Carré d’Art - Museum of Contemporary Art Nîmes, Nîmes; Centre National d´Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris; FNAC, Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, France; FRAC Languedoc Roussillon, Montpellier, France; Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Hirschhorn Museum, Washington DC; IFEMA, Madrid, Spain; Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; MUMOK, Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Museion, Bolzano; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/Main; Museum of Contemporary Art, Athena, Greece; MOMA, Museum Of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California; Serralves, Porto; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; TATE Modern, London; The British Museum, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
He is also a recipient of the 2016 Infinity Award: Art, 2011 Hasselblad Award, 2007 The Alpert Award in the Arts (First Prize) and Deutsche Börse Photography First Prize.
In 2002 Raad received first prizes at the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, the Vidarte 2002 Festival in Mexico and at the Oneiras Film and Video Festival in Portugal. He is also the recipient of the 2002 Media Arts Awards special prize and the 2001 Video Ex first prize.
