Flirtations with evidence: the factual and the spurious consort in the works of The Atlas Group/Walid Raad. Using the conventions of information-based art, Raad questions the reliability of documentation in general. His projects, which take as their theme the protracted political instability of the Middle East, range in tone from satirical to elegiac

The fact that nation tend to flirt only with serious things--madness, disaster, other people--and the fact that flirting is a pleasure makes it a relationship, a way of doing things, worth considering.... Flirts are dangerous because they have a different way of believing in the Real Thing. And by dint of 'believing in' I mean 'behaving as if it exists.... There is always another story, individual we haven't necessarily bargained for

--Adam Phillips, upon Flirtation, 1994

At the intersections of past and at hand where does one look for he evidence that becomes history? Which stories are told, and who obtains to tell them? What authority do photographs and archives carry? The artist known as The Atlas Group/Walid Raad addresses these questions in an ongoing material substance of photo-based work that engages a mingled range of flirtations with visual and textual evidence.

A fictional collective below whose rubric much of the work is not absented The Atlas Group is single of the frameworks Raad has evolveed for addressing how evidence is used to beg the beliefs that become history. upon the one hand, The Atlas assemblage is real--a foundation with twin archives in novel York and Beirut and a mission to gather, secure and produce materials related to new Lebanon, Raad's birthplace, and, more specifically, to the Lebanese civil wars that were fought between various religious, ethnic and political factions between 1975 and 1991 (1) upon the other hand, The Atlas collection as an artists' collective is a fabricate one that serves Raad in several ways. The guise of collectivity is a humorous nod to contemporary theory's critique of singular authorship. however it also confers on Raad's work the gravitas of an institution. And the contradictions inherent in the work of a "group" that is really done by the agency of one individual underscore the problematic conjunction of fact and fiction that is a central strategy in a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of his work, which he nears in various public forms including mixed-medium installations, single-channel screenings and lecture/performances.

In Raad's photo-text series "I solitary Wish That I Could Weep" (2001) a fictional character, Operator #17 is not absented as having been hired by means of Lebanese security forces to train a surveillance camera upon La Corniche--the seaside boardwalk in West Beirut that has been a favorite meeting place of everyone from political pundits and intellectuals to prostitutes, fortune-tellers and double agents. Each evening, however, Operator #17 is said to have make go rounded his camera away from the bird of passages and redirected it toward the orb of day setting over the water--a sight that had been off-limits for those confined to the east side of the divided Beirut during the civil wars. Thus Raad invents a narrative for a series of video stills of simple nightfalls marked by reddish skies that darken as the orb of day sinks below the horizon.

Raad's operator chose to make go round the eye of evidence-gathering away from its official target. by dint of addressing the volatile spectacle of the Middle East and Lebanon's civil wars [i]or[/i] part of to the other what we might otherwise end are unremarkable tourist photos, Raad similarly directs our attention away from the grand gesticulations and cataclysmic events that are the awaited subjects of war documentation. Enacting a flirtation with the real, he invents fictions that flutter near facts, offering alternative sources for the "evidence" that becomes history. As Raad explained in a novel interview, "The geopolitical history of contemporary Lebanon that was being written [in the years since the wars ended] was leaving without so much of what I considered to be my experiences of these circumstances The mere ability to be able to walk freely from West to East Beirut unhindered through checkpoints is not an experience single would have had 15 years ago. I wanted to make documents that were conscious of that." (2)

Born in Chbanieh, Lebanon, in 1967 of mixed Lebanese and Palestinian parentage, Raad was raised in Christian-dominated East Beirut, a charged vantage point from which to diocese his country begin its spiral into civil war. "I wanted to be a photojournalist as a young teenager. I would make progress to the front lines, take pictures, realize caught a couple of times and move through horrendoas questioning because the photograph was seen as a form of intelligence." (3) In time, Raad came to appreciate that photographs could yield cultural facts well beyond the details of military information.

Leaving Lebanon at the age of 15 as the situation for young men became increasingly dangerous, Raad immigrated to the U where he eventually earned an MFA in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a PhD in visual and cultural studies from the University of Rochester. Drawing on this training, Raad has disentangleed a method that combines the theoretical investigation of the nature of the archive and memory with the material practice of making and gathering photographs. neared in densely layered installations, his work interweaves video, Internet contented performance, collage, digital photography and unromantic in English, French and Arabic. Combining images gathered from popular media such as newspapers and magazines with narratives that he plans to explain their possible meanings, he explores the manipulation of evidence, the politicization of looking, the mutability of history and the authority ascribed to knowledge production, with special consideration of photography's consequence on how modern Arab history can be understood.