Cathy Caruth, “Trauma and Experience: Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4.
Walid Raad, in The Atlas Group (1989–2004): A Project by Walid Raad, eds. Kassandra Nakas and Britta Schmitz (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Köning), 96.
Here, too, he summons Rosler’s critiques of liberal humanist documentary traditions, not only in The Bowery… itself, but in her subsequent companion essay—Martha Rosler, “in, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography),” in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 151–206.
Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 23–24. Dominick LaCapra makes a related distinction in Writing History, Writing Trauma between “historical trauma” and “structural trauma” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 76–78. This account also echoes Hal Foster’s descriptions of archive-based work in “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004):5, n. 8.
Ibid., 151.
Ibid., 18; emphasis in original.
Amei Wallach, “The Fine Art of Car Bombings,” New York Times, June 20, 2004 →
See Robert Saliba, Beirut City Center Recovery: The Foch-Allenby and Etoile Conservation Area (Beirut: Solidere, 2004), 204–272.
André Lepecki, “‘After All, This Terror Was Not Without Reason’: Unfiled Notes on the Atlas Group Archive.” TDR, vol. 50, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 97.
Walid Raad, “The Beirut Al-Hadath Archive,” Rethinking Marxism, vol. 11, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 15–29; reproduced in Raad, Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: Some Essays from The Atlas Group Project (Lisbon: Culturgest; and Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Köning, 2007), 33–47.
Raad, “The Beirut Al-Hadath Archive,” 19; Raad, Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, 37.
Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 11.
Walid Raad, “Sweet Talk or Photographic Documents of Beirut,” Camera Austria 80 (December 2002): 43–53. One of many examples of Raad’s recycling of names, titles, files, and artworks, sometimes for the sake of expediency, and other times to further complicate the question of the document, the archive, and the artist as singular producer, this second Sweet talk should not to be confused with its initial incarnation as Sweet talk or photographic documents of Beirut (2002).
See, most succinctly, Jalal Toufic, “The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster,” in Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Arab World / Part I_Volume 1_Chapter_1 (Beirut: 1992–2005), eds. Clara Kim and Ryan Inouye (Los Angeles: California Institute of the Arts/REDCAT, 2009), 1–53.
Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 71.
H. G. Masters, “Those Who Lack Imagination Cannot Imagine What Is Lacking,” ArtAsiaPacific 65 (September/October 2009): 134.
Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990): 1044–1045.
In a gesture of (self-)institutional critique, one of the prints in Appendix XVIII: Plates elliptically records the gallery pushing for Raad and Bernard Khoury to be included in a proposed Lebanese national pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Patrick Healy, “Face of War Pervades New Beirut Art Center,” New York Times, July 7, 2009 →
Saree Makdisi, “Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solidere,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 672, 674.
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), 44.
Raad, in The Atlas Group (1989–2004), 104.
Walid Raad, “Miraculous Beginnings,” Public 16 (1997): 44–53; reproduced in Raad, Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, 6–15.
Miriam Cooke, “Beirut Reborn: The Political Aesthetics of Auto-Destruction,” Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 15, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 400.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 33, 59.
Sarah Rogers, “Forging History, Performing Memory: Walid Ra’ad’s The Atlas Project,” Parachute 108 (October/November/December 2002): 77. Psychoanalysis, along with Marxism, formed a heavy component of Raad’s graduate school studies.
See Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, “The Atlas Group Opens its Archives,” Bidoun, vol. 1, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 24.
See Toufic, “The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster,” 53, n. 64.
Walter Benjamin, quoted in Judith Butler, “Beyond Seduction and Morality: Benjamin’s Early Aesthetics,” in The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics, eds. Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 73–74.
Vered Maimon, “The Third Citizen: On Models of Criticality in Contemporary Artistic Practices,” October 129 (Summer 2009): 101.
Hostage (in print) also offers an expanded geopolitical context for the piece, drawn from research Raad conducted for his PhD dissertation in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. This version appeared in the catalogue for Catherine David’s traveling group exhibition “Contemporary Arab Representations,” which helped introduce Raad and other cultural producers from the Middle East to the larger art world. See Walid Raad, “Civilizationally, We Do Not Dig Holes to Bury Ourselves: Excerpts from an Interview with Souheil Bachar Conducted by Walid Raad of The Atlas Group,” in Tamáss: Contemporary Arab Representations, ed. Catherine David (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2002), 122–137. See also Walid Raad, Beirut … a la folie: A Cultural Analysis of the Abduction of Westerners in Lebanon in the 1980s, PhD dissertation, University of Rochester, 1996.
Raad, “Civilizationally, We Do Not Dig Holes to Bury Ourselves,” 128–129; Raad, Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, 58–59.
Raad, “Civilizationally, We Do Not Dig Holes to Bury Ourselves,” 130; Raad, Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, 60.
Kalí Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7.
Baer, Spectral Evidence, 7.
Walid Raad, “‘Oh God,’ He Said, Talking to a Tree: A Fresh-Off-the-Boat, Throat-Clearing Preamble about the Recent Events in Lebanon: And a Question to Walid Sadek,” Artforum, vol. 45, no. 2 (October 2006): 242–244.
Silvia Kolbowski and Walid Raad, Between Artists: Silvia Kolbowski and Walid Raad (New York: A.R.T. Press, 2006).
Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 286.
Upendra Baxi, quoted in Rustom Bharucha, “Between Truth and Reconciliation: Experiments in Theatre and Public Culture,” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 36, no. 39 (September–October, 2001), 3765.
Walid Raad, “In Conversation: Walid Raad with Seth Cameron,” Brooklyn Rail (December 2015/January 2016): 17. Jalal Toufic, Undeserving Lebanon (Beirut: Forthcoming Books, 2007).
Butler, “Beyond Seduction and Morality, 75.
LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 31.
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).