Wandering around Miraculous Beginnings, a collection of work by Lebanese artist Walid Raad currently showing at the Whitechapel Gallery I think I overhead a confident voice saying “Of course it’s important to remember that this isn’t reportage or documentary but art”. This sentence lodged in my head like a commandment that became steadily more important and yet harder to obey as I encountered successive assemblies of photos, video clips, prints and notebooks. These ‘projects’ are split into three main groups, two of which refer to the war(s) which tore Lebanon apart from 1975 to 1990 and a third that looks at the recent growth of an arts industry in the Middle East, financed by oil and gas revenues from the Gulf.
In The Atlas Group Raad has put together an archive of the Lebanese war, an act of preservation imposed on almost a generation of destruction. Some of this material is apparently very direct and factual, as in two long lines of photos of the engines of blown up cars, still pretty intact even after everything around them has been smashed. People stand and stare at the engines as though they could explain what has just happened and perhaps even warn them when and where the next explosion will take place. A counterpoint to this brutal, news headline type presentation is found in Secrets in the open sea, a series of seemingly placid blue prints. The trance-like calm induced by staring at these is undermined by an accompanying label which states that “chemical and digital analysis” had permitted a number of black and white photos of men and women to be retrieved, literally from out of the blue. Detective work by The Atlas Group then established that the photos were all pictures of people whose bodies had been found in the Mediterranean between 1975 and 1991.
This revelation of The Atlas Group as an active agent as well as an archive was to me the first major clue in the exhibition that it might be just as much about behind the scenes storytelling as a straightforward display of images. Different sections of The Atlas Group project purport to introduce a number of individuals who helped to create and preserve the archive over the course of the war. These personalities include Souheil Bachar who was held hostage for ten years and the rather obsessive but eternally optimistic Dr Fadl Fakhouri who, amongst other activities, took a photograph every time he thought the war had ended and collected pictures of cars that matched the make, model and colour of every car used as a bomb during the war.
The stories told about and by archive contributors like Bachar and Fakhouri allow Raad to adopt different perspectives and even disrupt and alter landscapes and time-lines, just as war does. Bachar speaks on a video clip about being imprisoned for three months alongside American hostages like Terry Anderson, retelling and representing a story that we tend to think we ‘know’ because of extensive reporting in the Western press. Dr Fakhouri appears as a young man in a series of 1950s holiday photos taken in Paris and Rome. Pictures of him standing beside the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame seem to conjure up the pre-Second World War mandate period when France ruled Lebanon, one of many countries to try and impose a particular story on this part of the world.
Although the cliché might irritate him Raad’s technique of inventing characters and weaving their stories through the raw material of war reporting – snatched photos and grainy video clips – gives this exhibition an Arabian Nights, story within a story quality. Raad has spoken about the amnesty law which was passed by the Lebanese parliament in 1991 to pardon all political crimes carried out prior to its introduction, with the exception of ‘crimes of assassination or attempted assassination of religious figures, political leaders and foreign or Arab diplomats’. His imagined people rebel against this attempt to confiscate certain aspects of the past as they repopulate the empty spaces left behind by war.
The difficulties of remaking Lebanon after the war recur in the latter part of this exhibition, a collection of work entitled Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World. Responding to the huge investment in art and culture epitomised by Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island which will include a branch of the Louvre and a performing arts centre designed by Zaha Hadid amongst much, much more Raad has produced a series of coloured plates and pictures of impeccably decorated yet empty rooms. Taken together these blocks of colour and deserted spaces give you the impression of being lost in an estate agent’s dream, just as he realises that all the elements for his deal-of-a-lifetime have fallen into place.
The empty rooms are linked together by a line of Arabic text that runs around the wall, white on white except for occasional annotations in red. This is a roll-call of the names of artists who worked in Lebanon over the last century, revealed to Raad by artists from the future. During this telepathic process some of the names became scrambled and were corrected in red by an art critic. These red exclamations could be seen either as an attempt by the present to control and censor the future or an act of defiance against the story future generations will decide to tell about the past.
The act of deciding whether or not to remember, made manifest both in censorship and amnesties, infuses this exhibition giving it the aura of illusion/delusion created by a successful magician. Raad not only occupies the disputed borderline between reportage and art he manipulates it, mixing fact and fiction and trying to decipher those points at which memories are either suppressed or become state policy. His ability to become part of this territory is perhaps proved by the fact that by the time I’d left the gallery I wasn’t sure whether I’d really heard that statement about art and reportage or imagined one of Raad’s characters saying it.
Walid Raad: Miraculous Beginnings is on at the Whitechapel Gallery until 2 January 2011
Image: Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut) by Walid Raad courtesy of Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg & Beirut
