Walid Raad's Art Blends Fact And Fiction, Spanning 40-Year Career

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Artist Walid Raad's nearly 40-year career is defined by a distinctive method of combining real-world documents with fictional narratives, a practice he described as“creating the documents I wished already existed.” This approach is showcased in his work at the current Venice Biennale and through retrospectives at institutions like MoMA.

Raad's artistic journey began in his teenage years in war-torn Beirut, where he documented his surroundings with a camera. A notable early experience involved photographing a birthday cake for Hassan Nasrallah, who was then a rising militiaman in the Lebanese Civil War. Raad recalled briefly fantasizing about poisoning the cake, stating,“But I was 15. I was a coward.” Decades later, Raad revisited this image in a series of digitally fabricated birthday cakes dedicated to political leaders difficult to celebrate, including Nasrallah, who became the leader of Hezbollah and was killed in a 2024 Israeli airstrike.

His work on display at the Venice Biennale features paintings, drawings, and photographs of beds that are said to have been slept in by Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader who survived over 40 assassination attempts. According to a wall text, Arafat“is said to have never slept in the same bed two nights in a row” and“could not afford to throw caution to the wind... so he lived, and slept, on the move.” Raad stated he spent 30 years searching for these beds. The artistic construction is evident in the incomplete paintings of the beds, bordered by tape and brushstrokes, and the cake images, which appear as if pulled from manila envelopes, suggesting their nature as evidence.

Scholar Saidiya Hartman praised Raad's“belief in the imaginative and the speculative” as“critical,” drawing parallels to her own“critical fabulation” approach to imagining the lives of oppressed individuals with limited historical traces. Raad's primary subject is the Arab world's politics and conflicts, particularly the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90). Artist Khalil Joreige, also exhibiting at the Venice Biennale, recounted the“real war of images” during the war, where“every militia had its own media station, television, newspaper, or radio,” influencing his generation's“sophisticated relationship to images.”

Art historians have analyzed Raad's unique methodology. Carrie Lambert-Beatty of Harvard described his work as an exemplar of“parafiction,” highlighting its power to make viewers experience a scenario as true while reminding them of alternative realities. Claire Bishop, in her book on artistic research, noted that Raad offers narrative synthesis rather than information overload, avoiding authoritative master narratives. In Fables & Forensics, the article's author characterized Raad's work as a form of surrealism for the information age, giving playful form to misinformation without reproducing fake news, adding that clues to the constructed nature of his documents are often found“at the edges.”

Raad is widely known for his work created under the guise of a fictional collective, the Atlas Group, which examines photography's complex relationship with truth. The Group's video Hostage: The Bachar tapes (#17 and #31), attributed to the year 2000, features Souheil Bachar's account of being held hostage in Lebanon from 1983 to 1993 alongside five Western men. The video, which includes manipulated footage of Ronald Reagan and English translations that contradict Bachar's Arabic words, reveals its fabricated elements.

Raad stated that the Atlas Group operated from 1989 to 2004, but he considers dates, like all facts, to be his artistic medium. Various sources, including magazines and museums, attribute the Group's origin to different years, such as 1967 (Raad's birth year), 1948, or 1945. The Group has also attributed archival images to nonexistent institutions, like the Museum of Fine Art New York. Both the Tate and MoMA have acquired editions of his series“My Neck Is Thinner than a Hair: Engines,” but list differing dates for the work: 2000–03 and 1996–2004, respectively. Despite Raad's claim of discontinuing the Group in 2004, a work from the Atlas Group appears in the 2026 Venice Biennale catalog, dated“printed 2023,” creating ambiguity about its creation date and whether the Group has truly disbanded.

Since a catalytic event in 2005, Raad's work has evolved, growing“stranger” over the past two decades. His later projects move beyond simple fact and fiction, presenting viewers with concepts like shrunken objects, resurrected paintings, and“vampires lurking in the archive.” Raad maintains a meticulous archive in a restored 19th-century barn in upstate New York's“Irish Alps,” an hour's drive from Bard College, where he teaches. He and his wife built a second structure, their home, duplicating the barn's floor plan nearby, with views reminiscent of a Hudson River School painting.

Source: ARTnews

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