The Atlas Group / Walid Raad

How The Atlas Group Works

Walid Raad conceived The Atlas Group and presented it as a research foundation^*6. The photographs, videos, notebooks, exhibitions, lectures, and website produced by Raad are real. The foundation’s institutional history, several donors and researchers, and parts of the provenance assigned to its documents were invented. In exhibitions, photographs and notebooks carrying file numbers appear on walls and in cases; in lectures, Raad explains their origins as a representative of the foundation. A single artist performs the roles of author, custodian, classifier, and interpreter, exposing every stage through which an archive is constituted.^*1*4

Raad began using The Atlas Group name publicly in the late 1990s, while the project itself assigns the foundation an operating period of 1989 to 2004.^*4. Accounts of its founding date and cofounders changed across presentations, and the biographies of its invented researchers and donors were revised. Through exhibitions, a website, lectures, and archival boxes, the imaginary foundation gradually acquired the outward behavior of an actual research institution.^*7. Allowing the organization’s own history to change demonstrated how chronologies and institutional narratives support trust in documents.

Why a Fictional Foundation Was Necessary

The Lebanese Civil War, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, involved multiple political factions, religious communities, foreign armies, and militias. Even after the ceasefire, no shared account of its causes and responsibilities took hold easily. Reconstruction prioritized the physical rebuilding of Beirut, while memories of the war remained divided among political groups, families, exiles, and news organizations. Raad has explained that he collected existing documents and photographs while also imagining “the worlds in which those documents existed”^*7. This idea led to a foundation that placed real and invented materials within the same system of classification.

Raad sought to address the events of the war together with the procedures through which fragmentary photographs and testimonies become public history. A work presented under an individual artist’s name identifies its maker, but it cannot reproduce all the authority added through donation, classification, preservation, exhibition, and scholarly presentation. A fictional foundation could attribute conflicting accounts to different contributors, place real and invented materials in the same formats, and allow Raad to explain them in the role of a researcher. The foundation allowed Raad to hold conflicting memories of the civil war within one project and to stage the institutional processes through which history acquires credibility.^*18*8

“Different Kinds of Facts”

Raad has said that his work begins with facts, and that facts possess historical, emotional, and aesthetic dimensions.A MoMA audio guide presents this statement as a key to understanding The Atlas Group’s method ^*2. Chronologies and statistics can record the date and location of an explosion and the number of deaths. Emotional memory also preserves the sensation of seeing a red car and anticipating a bomb, the excessive intensity of color, or a body repeating the same gesture. Fictional documents preserve verifiable information and emotional traces as distinct layers, widening the forms through which wartime experience can be conveyed.

Giving Documents a Provenance

Seen without their captions, The Atlas Group’s photographs can resemble newspaper clippings, family snapshots, police records, or research notes. Names such as Dr. Fadl Fakhouri and Souheil Bachar, along with notebook numbers, donation dates, and classification codes, give the materials a provenance. KADIST describes Raad’s manipulation of vernacular photographs and archival documents as an examination of the boundaries between document and fiction, history and memory, discourse and experience^*5. In a MoMA audio guide, Raad describes combining old family slides with photographs of assassinations gathered from Lebanese photographic archives, treating images he made and images he collected as materials within the same process^*3. The invented author functions as a character within the narrative and as a means of exposing the institutional habit of establishing value by asking whose document it is.

Lecture-Performance

Raad paired wall displays with lecture-performances, showing slides and explaining the origins of files in the manner of a researcher or foundation representative. The narration adopts the measured tone of an academic presentation, while contradictions in dates and relationships gradually emerge. Aperture argues that the lecture itself becomes an artistic form that produces the credibility of the documents in real time^*13. The audience compares images, captions, and the speaker’s demeanor, while testing its own inclination to trust a professional mode of address. In a conversation with John Menick, Raad discusses in detail how the work asks viewers to assess both the lecturer’s authority and the credibility of the story^*17*14.

Experiences That Escape Classification

The Atlas Group follows the process through which materials receive authors’ names, dates, classification numbers, and donation records, are arranged in orderly sequences, and come to be read as historical evidence. Classification turns fragments into searchable history, while organizing sensation and contradiction into a coherent account. By introducing invented contributors and shifting provenances, Raad placed the understanding produced by archival order beside the experiences that order excludes.

Missing Lebanese Wars

“Missing Lebanese Wars” uses notebooks, clippings, photographs, and annotations to construct the invented story of Lebanese historians who attended the racetrack and wagered on the exact moment the winning horse crossed the finish line. Museo Reina Sofía presents the work as a parallel between faith in photography’s “decisive moment” and the historian’s act of determining when an event begins and ends^*20. The racetrack finish photograph makes concrete the question of who selects a war’s beginning, turning points, and end, and which records preserve those decisions.

My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair

This project is framed as an investigation of car bombs used during the Lebanese wars through the relations among wreckage at blast sites, engines, newspaper photographs, photographers, and the publications in which the images appeared. The official archive describes the work as a study of 3,641 car-bomb incidents^*10. By tracing engines thrown far from the explosion and the positions from which press cameras photographed them, the work follows the path through which evidence of violence is produced across the site, the newspaper, and the archive.

The Bachar Tapes

In “The Bachar Tapes,” the testimony of the fictional Lebanese hostage Souheil Bachar is inserted into the history of Western hostages held in Lebanon during the 1980s. The National Gallery of Canada describes the work as an inquiry into which experiences enter international news through the translation, editing, and delay of video testimony^*11. By adding a witness who did not exist, the work makes visible how established hostage narratives were edited around particular nationalities, languages, and forms of masculinity. SFMOMA’s artist record also identifies the video as a major work in which photography, testimony, and translation intersect^*9.

Comparison with the Arab Image Foundation

During the same period in Beirut, the Arab Image Foundation collected and preserved historic and studio photographs, providing a physical repository for vulnerable regional photographic cultures. A conversation in Bidoun places this real archive beside The Atlas Group: the former preserves material objects and researches their provenance, while the latter uses fictional donors and classifications to question the authority of preservation itself^*7. Raad affirms the value of preservation while treating the assignment of preserved objects to particular narratives as a separate artistic problem.

Fiction and Historical Responsibility

The Atlas Group can be criticized for relativizing real suffering by mixing invented people and events into the history of an actual war. In a conversation with The Brooklyn Rail, Raad states that he made the project’s images and stories and attributed them to fictional figures, while asking that the method not be reduced to a simple test of truth or falsity ^*15. A risk remains when only audiences familiar with museum conventions can recognize the device: Lebanese history may then be consumed as a conceptual game. The work’s ethical tension lies in keeping this danger visible and extending the question to who has the right to use fiction. An ICA Boston retrospective presented Raad’s movement between fact and invention together with this ethical unease^*12.

Post-Documentary

Photographic history already contained debates over documentary evidence and artistic practices that criticized archival classification and institutional authority. Raad connected those debates to memories of the Lebanese Civil War and combined a fictional foundation, changing provenances, and lecture-performances within a single structure^*18. A single invented photograph addresses only the image itself. Ownership, storage, narration, and public acceptance require a larger structure. Through the foundation, Raad created authors, donors, classifiers, a collecting institution, and a lecturer, reconstructing the entire process through which facts gain social credibility. Teaching materials from Art Resources Transfer likewise describe his movement among the roles of archivist, historian, teacher, performer, and artist in order to examine the power and limits of documents to communicate history^*16. The Atlas Group’s significance within photographic history lies in shifting the question from “Is this photograph authentic?” to “What makes this photograph credible as a historical fact?”^*11*19.

Real and Invented Materials

The real elements are Walid Raad himself; the photographs, videos, and notebooks he produced; existing newspaper photographs and broadcast materials; exhibitions; lectures; and the official website. Invented elements include the institutional history of an independent foundation, contributors such as Dr. Fadl Fakhouri and Souheil Bachar, researchers’ biographies, and parts of the documents’ provenance. Individual files combine the two. “My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair,” for example, uses actual press materials and field research, reediting them as the foundation’s research files. The construction asks viewers to read the content of an image together with the credibility conferred by an author’s name, a date, a classification number, and a museum display.^*1