WALID RAAD

Recent and/or not-so-recent works

click here to return to the main page

PAULA COOPER GALLERY
521 W 21ST STREET
17 February – 24 March, 2007

 

NEW YORK – The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent work by Walid Raad.  This will be the gallery’s first exhibition with this Lebanese-born artist whose work on the contemporary history of Lebanon has garnered much critical acclaim.  The exhibition will run from 17 February through 24 March, 2007. 

Raad’s work explores the representation of war and other traumatic events through film, video, and photography.  He is well-known for founding The Atlas Group, a foundation documenting the contemporary history of Lebanon.  The collection of documents archived by the foundation is a mixture of found and constructed evidence whose authenticity, authorship and even date are always in question.  In blurring the line between historical facts and constructed narratives, Raad investigates how history – and specifically violent historical events – is written and disseminated.  In the words of a recent critic, the works “function not as emblems of fact or scraps of evidence to support the assertions of history, but rather as traces, as symptoms, as strange structural links between history, memory, and fantasy, between what is known to be true and what is needed to be believed.”
The exhibition will include two series of photographs and a video piece investigating the contemporary history of war in the Middle East.  We Decided To Let Them Say “We Are Convinced” Twice. It Was More Convincing This Way (1996), a series of 15 large-scale photographs, is based on the Israeli Army’s invasion and siege of Beirut in 1982. That summer, the 15-year-old Raad took photographs of military activity in West Beirut.  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.
In the 1970s, Raad collected bullets and shrapnel in Beirut, carefully documenting the the bullets’ colors and photographing the sites of his findings. Lets Be Honest, The Weather Helped (1988) presents Raad’s black and white photographs with colored dots placed over the locations of bullet holes.  The colors of the dots correspond to the colors of the bullets’ tips, which he later learned are codes devised by manufacturing countries to mark their cartridges.
Finally, the video piece We Can Make Rain But No One Came To Ask (2006) imagines a collaboration between a car bomb investigator and a fearless photojournalist, focusing on diagrams, notes, videotapes and photographs produced by the team about a specific detonation in Beirut in 1986.
Walid Raad was born in Chbanieh, Lebanon, in 1967, and grew up in the mostly Christian sector of East Beirut.  He lives in New York and Beirut and has been Associate Professor at the Cooper Union, New York, since 2002. He is a member of the Fondation Arabe pour l’Image (FAI) in Beirut, founded in 1996.  His work has been presented at Documenta 11, Kassel (2002), the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the 2003 Venice Biennale, the Kitchen, New York (2006) and the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2006).

For more information, please contact the gallery at (212) 255-1105, or anthony@paulacoopergallery.com

 

534 West 21st Street, New York, New York 10011 Telephone 212.255.1105 Facsimile 212.255.5156