Walid Raad and the Atlas Group

Walid Raad and the Atlas Group

I was talking about the Project -1001 und eine Frage- to my boss in the Art Book Store where I was working and he showed me 3 books of the work of Walid Raad and the Atlas Group, the "group" he has founded. There are others collage and photography works wich I find  really interesting and inspiring. Here - Let's Be Honest, the Weather Helped- .

(Marie)

"Walid Raad (Ra'ad) (born 1967 in Chbanieh, Lebanon) is a contemporary media artist. The Atlas Group is a fictional collective, the work of which is produced by Walid Raad.

His works to date include video, photography and literary essays. All, in one way or another, deal with the contemporary history of Lebanon with particular emphasis on the wars in Lebanon between 1975 to 1991. The work is also often concerned with the representation of traumatic events of collective historical dimensions; and the ways film, video, and photography function as documents of physical and psychological violence.^[1] He is also a member of the Arab Image Foundation."(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walid_Raad)

"With Let's Be Honest, the Weather Helped (1998/2006), Raad creates a brutal, radical juxtaposition of reportage and fine art. Five photographs of bombs and bombed surfaces are overlaid with pop-art like colored dots, resembling children's stickers, a playfulness contrasting and thus negating the violence, and adding them into notebooks along notes, drawings. The works take a skeptical approach to representation, contrasting the small impression-like dots with the geological trauma they are meant to depict. Raad subsequently found out that the munitions industry references bombs by colors not dissimilar to the ones used in the pieces."(http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/news/2010-11-04/walid-raad-whitechapel/)