In his first comprehensive American survey, held at MoMA, New York, Walid Raad’s immensely convincing role of artist as impostor confronts, head on, challenging issues of truth, historicity, and colonialism. Raad was born in 1967 and raised in Lebanon during the civil war of 1975 to 1990. This exhibition includes his two extensive projects, The Atlas Group (1989–2004), and Scratching on the Things I Could Disavow (2007–ongoing), which embrace and deny events, documents, notebooks, videos and archival material from the war, through the artist’s process of blending fact and fiction, truth and illusion, history and imagination.
Before one enters the third floor special exhibition space that presents objects from The Atlas Group, one encounters images and text from Scratching on the Things I Could Disavow: Les Louvres, which serves as a precursor to Raad’s methodology. It is about artifacts ostensibly shipped from the Islamic collection at the Louvre in Paris to the Louvre Abu Dhabi. From the detailed photographs and subject matter, it is made evident that the objects that arrived in the packages to Abu Dhabi did not resemble their original appearance in Paris. Due to the weather in the desert, two relics in the same crate ‘had traded skins with each other’, making them unrecognisable. Their origins were only apparent in the laboratory under intense scrutiny.
Similarly, in Raad’s fictitious Atlas collective, comprising material gathered from various sources, nothing is what it appears to be. Although the project is informed by the deadly fifteen-year combat that involved the Sunnis, Shias, Maronite Christians, and armed forces from Palestine, Israel, Syria, America, and France—the dubious information forces us to reappraise our perception of historical material. From the