Walid Raad

(Lebanese, born 1967)

Walid Raad is a contemporary Lebanese artist whose work often focuses on the recent history of his country. Working in photography, video, sculpture, and performance, Raad probes the function memory serves in forming the history of war and art. “I would also hope that we do not reduce this entire question of the document into the fact versus fiction debate; history versus aesthetics; journalism versus art; true versus false; real versus imaginary; sober versus drunk; clear versus opaque,” he has said of his practice. Born in 1967 in Chbanieh, Lebanon, Raad and his family emigrated to the United States in 1983. He received a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology, followed by an MA and PhD in cultural and visual studies from the University of Rochester. In 1989, Raad founded The Atlas Group— a collection of films, videos, photographs, and other essays—which he uses to explain Lebanese history. The primary goal of The Atlas Group is to create a fictional archive that reexamines traditional documentation and preservation methods. The artist has gone on to participate in documenta 11 and the Venice Biennale. He currently lives and works between New York, NY and Beirut, Lebanon. Today, Raad’s works are held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.