Walid Ra´ad & The Atlas Group

Walid Raad works with video, photography, and literary essays to investigate the contemporary history of war in his native Lebanon. (We Decided To Let Them Say “We Are Convinced” Twice. It Was More Convincing This Way.), a series of 15 large-scale photographs, specifically recalls the Israeli Army’s invasion and siege of Beirut in 1982. That summer Raad, an intrepid 15-year-old with a telephoto lens, took photographs of near and distant military activity in West Beirut from his home in the eastern sector. Recently reprinting the pictures from the original, now degraded, negatives he discovered that the images’ unusual discoloration, creases, and holes offered a disturbing but realistic representation of a broken world rendered flat by the series of catastrophes that had befallen it.

Acclaimed for his long-running project The Atlas Group, Raad grapples with the representation of traumatic events of collective historical dimensions and the ways in which film, video, and photography function as documents of physical and psychological violence.

Raad's work has been shown in Documenta 11, the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, and numerous other venues in Europe, the Middle East, and North America. He was recently featured in The Museum of Modern Art Oxford’s exhibition Out of Beirut and was a contributor to a corresponding section in Artforum’s October 2006 issue.

Exhibiting Artist Lecture: Walid Raad & The Atlas Group The Loudest Muttering is Over Thursday, November 9, 7 PM Henry Auditorium Discounted admission for Henry Members, Seniors & Students.

The Loudest Muttering is Over is a multimedia lecture performance using events from the Lebanese wars as a lens through which to examine how we represent, remember, and make sense of war. Raad incorporates slides, notebook pages, and videotape excerpts as historical artifacts attributed to imaginary sources, such as Dr. Fadi Fakhouri, a leading historian of Lebanese history, or Souheil Bachar, a former hostage. Raad’s lecture-performances conjure up an alternate universe that mimics conventional formats of visual and textual representation.

(We Decided To Let Them Say “We Are Convinced” Twice. It was More Convincing This Way.) A project by Walid Raad is curated by Associate Curator Sara Krajewski and generously supported by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, ArtsFund, and Paula Cooper Gallery. In-kind support provided by Hotel Max and Hogue Cellars. Additional funding for the exhibition publication provided by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation.

Walid Ra´ad & The Atlas Group 
(We Decided To Let Them Say “We Are Convinced” Twice. It was More Convincing This Way.)
Kurator: Sara Krajewski