Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 57.
Sandra Mackey, Mirror of the Arab World: Lebanon in Conflict (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 119.
Walid Raad, “Let’s Be Honest, the Rain Helped: Excerpts from an Interview with The Atlas Group,” in Review of Photographic Memory, ed. Jalal Toufic (Beirut: Arab Image Foundation, 2004), 45.
Before receiving regular exhibition opportunities (and before developing a body of art objects for exhibition spaces), Raad performed The Atlas Group on the European alternative theater circuit and at independent film festivals. His first prominent art-world appearance in the United States, as part of the 2002 Whitney Biennial, was for performance, not the exhibition component.
Raad, “Let’s Be Honest, the Rain Helped,” 44.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972).
John Menick, “Imagined Testimonies: An Interview with Walid Ra’ad” →. Originally published at bbs.thing.net, March 25, 2002.
It may be helpful to know that “the Palais des Paix is a racetrack like no other. Situated near Beirut’s city centre and divided by the infamous Green Line, the track was a repeated theatre of war … Riddled with bullet holes, the track nonetheless remained intermittently open during the war” (Dina Al-Kassim, “Crisis of the Unseen: Unearthing the Political Aesthetics of Hysteria in the Archaeology and Arts of the New Beirut.” Parachute 108 (October/November/December 2002): 161, n. 6), or that in his foreword to a book detailing his company’s accomplishments in rebuilding Beirut, Nasser Chammaa, chairman and general manager of the construction and engineering firm Solidere (founded by Hariri), boasted, “By the end of 2001, those who had wagered on Beirut city center scored” (Robert Saliba, Beirut City Center Recovery: The Foch-Allenby and Etoile Conservation Area (Beirut: Solidere, 2004), 9). But these are secondary details buried in Raad’s work.
John Tagg, The Burden Of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 65.
Cathy Caruth, “Trauma and Experience: Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 10; emphasis in original.
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 38.
For a compilation, see Walid Raad, Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: Some Essays from The Atlas Group Project (Lisbon: Culturgest; and Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Köning, 2007).
Jalal Toufic, “Ruins,” in The Atlas Group (1989–2004): A Project by Walid Raad, eds. Kassandra Nakas and Britta Schmitz (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Köning), 56.
In 1983, the year between the Israeli invasion and a particularly violent stretch in the wars, Raad’s family sent him to the United States to live with a relative. He was also at the age when many adolescents were forcibly pressed into a militia.
Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 39.