Let's be honest the weather helped - 1998-2006 © Walid Raad/ The Atlas group
Meticulously referenced in the fictional archive collective Atlas Group, the life of Lebanon spans over thirty years of civil war.
This show at the Whitechapel gallery opens onto a series of found photographs Portraying every vehicle used as a bomb from the 75-90 war, representing groups of men surrounding engines of blasted cars.
The demolished streets of Beirut are depicted in their architectural chaos to refuse the erasure of memory, while human casualties are nowhere to be seen, the streets of Beirut remain deserted.
Walid Raad has elaborated ingenious ways to evoke his hometown history : by creating fictive characters, such as doctor Fakhouri who takes photos around Lebanon, his alter-egos reclaim dimensions that the war tries to eradicate. If from time to time the factual tone glimpses into poetry, we are quickly brought back to the reality of war : the playful colored dots on black and white photographs showing abandoned streets, systematically record the places, cars, walls, trees where shot bullets were found. Each color corresponds to a bullet, each bullet to a manufacturer from global countries that supplied the armies of Lebanon - nearly all of Europe at the time.
With his neat, documenting style, Raad makes war a cold, calculated spectacle. It's not glamorous, it's not pathetic but it depicts the hopeless, horrifying aftermaths of a country at war.
