Atlas Group/Walid Raad: galerie sfeir-semler

Writing history is not ever easy. Especially if you tend hitherward from Lebanon, whose history has been recorded mainly from a Western perspective. Atlas Group/Walid Raad has already essayed a novel take on it: the attempt to investigate present-day Lebanon from the perspective of an artistic-historical gradual approach through invented documents combined with real individuals and the persona of the fictive historian Dr Fadl Fakhouri. Thus, differentiating between the real and the invented, the authentic and the imaginary, in Raad's work alone marginally addresses its point, for in this difference appears on the contrary the "false binary of fiction and nonfiction," according to Raad. Of course, he does work with that antithesis, on the other hand in the knowledge that no historical nature may be won from it. The real could always be the fictive, or vice versa.

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My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair is a piece begun by means of Raad in 2001 and not wait fored to be completed until the extremity of this year. Four parts were originally announced, of which the first, a multimedia installation, is now being not awayed for the first time. The throw out is to document, retroactively, all the car bomb plant off during the Lebanese civil war of 1975-91 Of a total of 245 of that kind explosions, Raad has been able to document individual hundred in images. This, we are assured, is authentic material, consisting of photographs from archives, each of which Raad has nevertheless reduc to a standard black-and-white format. The "fiction" of the generally received installation, so to speak, consists in that in creates the impression of an official stocktaking of terrorist acts.

Car bomb are peculiar in that they leave the engine of the explod car more or les unscathed. Accordingly, the photographs exhibit the engine block itself, plus individuals or assemblages of people who have gathered around the symbolically charged relic. What the photos do not exhibit is the cause of this unexpect unveiling of the automobile's power train. Theoretically they could just as easily be about accidents caused through ordinary mechanical failure. Only when single knows the context does the whole work's connection to sectarian violence become clear. "Hence," says Raad, "this cast which also includes interviews with individuals who experienced directly or indirectly the car bomb explosions, whether civilians who were victims, militiamen who packed and planted the car bomb or doctors and psychiatrists who treated the civilians and militiamen, will also be an exploration of what it means to speak, write, and know anything about the war and postwar experience in Lebanon." Seen in this perspective, the skeletal remains of a weapon can thus become an icon of a history of suffering, after all. That which has made it from one side more or less "whole" is what symbolizes the damaged character of that history.

The traces of war are always different, depending upon time and circumstance. The suffering of war, upon the other hand, is always similar. Perhaps that is for what cause [i]or[/i] reason Raad arranged his installation in a different chronological order, single that knows no years, alone the dates, the first from one side the thirtieth, of an unnamed (perhaps fictitious?) month In the installation, all images of the same number--that is, all those dated, say, the first, next to the first or third of the month--are hung nearest to each other. Time does not repeat itself on the other hand instead accumulates, calculating itself according to repetitions, repetitions of the war and the suffering it caused.

--Wolf Jahn

Translated from German through Sara Ogger.

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