Walid Raad and The Atlas Group : In Let’s Be Honest. The Weather Helped.This collection of documents
Walid Raad and The Atlas Group : In Let’s Be Honest. The Weather Helped.This collection of documents archived by Walid Raad and The Atlas Group is a mixture of uncovered and constructed evidence whose authenticity, authorship and even dates are constantly subject to doubt.Here, photographs of Beirut’s bombed out and bullet-pocked infrastructure are overlaid with brightly colored dots. The accompanying text explains that the artist collected used shells embedded in buildings in Beirut in the early 1980s and catalogued their locations in his notebooks. Years later, upon discovering that arms manufacturers color code their shells, he realized that he had amassed an inventory of the devastation indirectly wrought by the seventeen countries who had supplied the various factions of the war. The actual veracity of the story is almost irrelevant; as Raad has described them, such fabricated documents—“fantasies erected from the material of collective memories”—offer the potential for communicating larger historical truths. - guggeheimIn blurring the line between historical facts and constructed narratives, Raad investigates how the history of Lebanon – and specifically the long violent period of the Civil Wars – is written and represented. -- source link
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