Image: A series of photographs titled “I might die before I get a rifle,” part of a retrospective of work by Walid Raad at the Museum of Modern Art. Agaton Strom for The New York Times
Dear Photo Folks - tonight at 6:00 PM in Tyler's Temple Contemporary is an artist's talk that would well be worth attending. Walid Raad, an artist/photographer of great renown will be presenting. Here's some background:
WALID RAAD, B. 1967, CHBANIEH, LEBANON; THE ATLAS GROUP, FOUNDED 1989
Walid Raad was born in Chbanieh, Lebanon, in 1967, and raised in East Beirut. In 1983, amid ongoing war, he immigrated to the United States. Raad briefly studied medicine at Boston University before transferring to the Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, to study photography. While at a young age Raad hoped to be a photojournalist, he subsequently realized the political complexities of producing images of his experience of the civil war in Lebanon (1975–91), and this complexity became his focus instead. After completing his BFA, he enrolled in the Visual and Cultural Studies program at the University of Rochester, where he earned his MA and Ph.D. Raad began teaching in 1991 and is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Art at the Cooper Union, New York. He explores his interest in the intersections between history, culture, politics, and art, specifically in the Middle East, through a conceptual approach to photography, performance, video, collage, and multimedia installation.
In 1998 Raad returned to Beirut to perform as a lecturer at an academic conference under the guise of a fictional historical preservation foundation that he called The Atlas Group. As a method of questioning the authority of documented experience and the role of memory in this documentation, Raad constructed alternative narratives of Lebanese history and introduced them in the format of an archive. The Atlas Group became a widely exhibited artist project of material collected, produced, and presented by Raad.
Raad's most recent, ongoing project, Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World (2007–), continues to use multimedia installation and the lecture format to reflexively explore art infrastructure in the Middle East. Raad belongs to a growing community of Lebanese artists, writers, and curators, including the contemporary theorist and artist Jalal Toufic, who are engaged in critical and artistic examinations of the contemporary history of their nation, and specifically the effect decades of wartime trauma have on culture and tradition.
Raad has been included in two Whitney Biennials, New York (2000 and 2002). In 2001 he co-organized Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography at the New York University Grey Art Gallery using the photographic archive of the Arab Image Foundation, a nonprofit organization for the preservation of visual culture based in Beirut. He participated in Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002), and the following year his work was included in the Venice Biennale. Raad had his first solo exhibition in the United States at the Kitchen, New York (2006). The Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Beirut, hosted his first solo show in the Middle East two years later.
Raad was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2009); was selected as a finalist for the 2010 Hugo Boss Prize at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and was awarded the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2011). Raad's work has been featured in major solo exhibitions at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2006); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2006); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2007); Museo nacional centro de arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2009); and the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010–11). He lives and works in Beirut and New York.