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| Walid Raad | |
|---|---|
| Name | Walid Raad |
| Birth date | 1967 |
| Birth place | Chbanieh, Beirut |
| Nationality | Lebanese American |
| Occupation | Visual artist, photographer, videographer, performance artist, writer, professor |
| Years active | 1990s–present |
| Notable works | The Atlas Group, Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, Let’s Be Honest, the Weather Helped |
| Awards | Prince Claus Award, MacArthur Fellowship (fellowships and grants) |
Walid Raad is a Lebanese-born visual artist, photographer, videographer, performance artist, and writer known for experimental archival projects that examine history, memory, and representation of conflict. He rose to prominence with a long-term fictive-archival project that blends documentary forms, invented archives, and performance to interrogate the Lebanese Civil Wars and their aftermath. Raad’s work has been exhibited widely in museums, biennials, and academic settings and has influenced contemporary debates in contemporary art, historiography, and media studies.
Raad was born in Chbanieh near Beirut and grew up during the Lebanese Civil Wars, a context that shaped his later practice. He left Lebanon in the mid-1980s and studied in the United States, receiving degrees from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Cornell University, where he trained in fine arts and read literature and visual culture. During his graduate studies he engaged with archival theory, postcolonial studies, and photographic histories developed by scholars associated with Yale University, Columbia University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and encountered contemporaries from the worlds of Havana Biennial, Documenta, and Venice Biennale circuits.
Raad’s practice blends photography, video, performance, installation, and textual fabrication to create layered narratives that challenge documentary truth claims. He often constructs fictional authors, fabricated documents, and staged performances presented alongside authentic materials, deploying strategies akin to those used by artists such as Christian Boltanski, Mona Hatoum, Shimon Attie, and Doris Salcedo. His method employs archival fabrication, oral history techniques, staged reenactment, and multimedia installation, referencing archival models used by institutions like the Library of Congress, British Museum, and National Archives and Records Administration. Raad collaborates with historians, archivists, filmmakers, and performers from institutions including Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago to blur lines between testimony, evidence, and fiction.
Central to Raad’s oeuvre is an ongoing project presented under the rubric of The Atlas Group (1989–2004), an imagined foundation that archives and produces material related to the Lebanese wars. Key works include the video series Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, photographic projects such as the Hostage series, and installations like Let’s Be Honest, the Weather Helped. These projects engage with events such as the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the Battle of the Hotels, and the bombardments of Beirut while inventing micro-histories, dossiers, and pseudonymous researchers. Raad’s publications, exhibitions, and lectures frequently deploy fabricated chronologies and indexes modeled after projects like the Oral History Workshop and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London publications.
Raad has exhibited at major international venues and events, including solo and group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and numerous biennials such as the Venice Biennale, Sydney Biennale, and Sharjah Biennial. Performances and public lectures have taken place at academic and cultural sites like Harvard University, Princeton University, The New School, Yale University Art Gallery, and Serpentine Galleries. Collaborative projects have involved curators and artists from Documenta and the Walker Art Center.
Raad’s work explores memory, testimony, representation, and the ethics of documenting violence, drawing on intellectual and artistic influences from Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Annette Wieviorka. His practice dialogues with photographic and archival traditions represented by figures such as August Sander, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and contemporary artists including Sophie Calle and Thomas Hirschhorn. Recurring themes include trauma, the politics of archives, constructed historiography, and the aesthetics of evidence, with references to historical events like the Lebanese Civil Wars, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon (1982), and regional geopolitics involving Syria and France.
Critics and scholars have debated Raad’s ethical approach to documentary truth, praising his rigor while contesting the use of fictionalization in contexts of mass violence. Reviews and essays about his work have appeared in venues associated with Artforum, October (journal), Frieze, and academic journals linked to Columbia University Press and MIT Press. Raad has received numerous honors and fellowships from institutions such as the Prince Claus Fund, national arts councils, and foundations offering support comparable to the MacArthur Fellows Program and major museum grants. His work is held in collections at institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou, and has been discussed in scholarship produced at King’s College London and New York University.
Raad has taught and lectured widely, holding faculty positions and visiting professorships at institutions including the Cooper Union, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Rhode Island School of Design, and Brown University. He has contributed to curricula in programs at Pratt Institute, California Institute of the Arts, and Bard College, and has been a speaker and critic in graduate studios and conferences convened by Harvard University and Yale University. Through seminars, workshops, and public programs, Raad has influenced artists, historians, curators, and students engaged with contemporary art, photographic theory, and archival practice.
Category:Lebanese artistsCategory:Contemporary artistsCategory:Artists from Beirut