Walid Raad

Walid Raad works across installation, performance, video, and photography in order to grapple with the legacy of the Lebanese Civil War; memory, loss, carnage, and dizzying acts of reconstruction are all major motifs. Raad is perhaps best known for The Atlas Group (1989–2004), which operated as a fictional research and preservation foundation for collecting ephemera related to the war and inventing alternate histories. Such blurring of fact and fiction is also present in the affiliated project Secrets in the Open Sea (1994), a group of photographs with an accompanying fictional narrative about their “discovery” beneath wartime rubble. Raad has participated in Documenta, the Istanbul Biennial, the Whitney Biennial, and the Venice Biennale. His work belongs in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Stedelijk Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou, and the Kunsthaus Zürich.