Untitled Document

The Atlas Group/ Walid Raad

The Bachar Polaroids

The Bachar Polaroids, 2011, Set of 20 plates, inkjet print on archival paper, 20,4 x 20,4 cm, each, Edition 7 + 2 a.p.

During his ten-year captivity in Lebanon, Souheil Bachar was photographed over twenty times by his captors. From time to time, his captors would leave him some of the Polaroids they deemed unfit to release to the local and international press. In these images, and for some unknown reason, his body and face were always cut out. With the few brushes and colors available to him in his cell, Bachar decided to fill himself in.

Sweet Talk

Sweet Talk A project by The Atlas Group in collaboration with Lamia Hilwé In 1973, The Atlas Group initiated the ongoing project titled Sweet Talk . The foundation recruited dozens of men and women to photograph streets, storefronts, buildings, and other spaces of national, technological, architectural, cultural, political, and economic significance in Beirut. In this exhibition, The Atlas Group displays a selection of photographs produced in 1992 and 2005 by Lamia Hilwé. Each of the following plates includes: a small black and white rectangular photograph of a building; and a large color photograph of the same building. Hilwé produced and submitted the small black and white photographs in 1992.
Twelve years later, she revisited and submitted a variation of the same photograph as a contemporary document of the same building. About The Atlas Group :

The Atlas Group is a project and of a foundation established in Beirut (Lebanon) in 1967 to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon. The Atlas Group locates, collects, preserves, displays, produces and studies audio, visual, literary and other documents that shed light on this history. The documents are preserved in The Atlas Group Archive located in Beirut (Lebanon) and New York (USA).

Craters

"I Might Die Before I Get A Riffle", 1989 - 2008, 160 x 212 cm, Edition 7 + 1 AP

"I might die before I get a Rifle" (1989)

works by Farrid Sarroukh, Janah Hilwé, Maha Traboulsi, Hannah Mrad and Mhammad Sabra
a Projekt of Walid Raad
curated by Marwan Baroudi

In 1989, Marwan Baroudi, chief curator of Part Four in Alexandria (Egypt) mounted an exhibition titled, I Might Die Before I Get A Rifle. The exhibition featured the works of five artists from Lebanon: Farrid Sarroukh, Janah Hilwé, Maha Traboulsi, Hannah Mrad, and Mhammad Sabra. It brought together five projects by artists who explored how the physical and psychological violence of the past fourteen years in Lebanon had been lived, experienced, and formed.
Remarkably, a few years later, in 2002, many of the same documents would emerge again, but this time attributed to The Atlas Group, an art project by the artist Walid Raad. Over the years, Raad has proposed various definitions of his project. Today, he refers to The Atlas Group as “an art project undertaken between 1989 and 2004 about the possibilities and limits of writing the contemporary history of Lebanon, and/or The Atlas Group is an artwork produced sometime in the last decade about a universe of objects, characters, and situations in and from Lebanon that can only emerge in fiction”.

In 2004, Johan Holten asked Marwan Baroudi to revisit his I Might Die Before I Get A Rifle. Baroudi and Holten were interested in making available again the 1989 exhibition, displaying the same artworks, complete with original captions. This proved to be more difficult than originally thought as Baroudi spent four years tirelessly locating and gathering the original artworks from the various places where they had scattered. This exhibition owes much to his endurance and perseverance, and to the generosity of the various collectors, institutions, and others who preserved these artworks. The Heidelberger Kunstverein is very grateful for their willingness to loan the works for this exhibition.

(We Decided To Let Them Say "We Are Convinced" Twice. It Was More Convincing This Way.)


Beirut '82, Onlookers, 2005	Beirut '82, Plane I, 2005	Beirut '82, Plane II, 2005	Beirut '82, Plane III, 2005	Beirut '82, Plane IV, 2005

Beirut '82, City I, 2005	Beirut '82, City II, 2005	Beirut '82, City III, 2005	Beirut '82, City IV, 2005	Beirut '82, City V, 2005

Beirut '82, Soldiers I, 2005	Beirut '82, Soldiers II, 2005	Beirut '82, Soldiers III, 2005	Beirut '82, Artillery I, 2005	Beirut '82, Artillery II, 2005

Set of 15 plates, framed digital prints, 110 cm x 171 cm each, edition 5.

We Decided To Let Them Say 'We Are Convinced' Twice.

A project from The Atlas Group Archive by Marwan Hanna In the summer of 1982, I stood along with others in a parking lot across from my mother's apartment in East Beirut, and watched the Israeli land, air, and sea assault on West Beirut.The PLO along with the Lebanese and Syrian allies retaliated, as best they could.

East Beirut welcomed the invasion, or so it seemed. West Beirut resisted it, or so it seemed. In 1982, I was thirteen, and wanted to get as close as possible to the events, or as close as my newly acquired telephoto lens permitted me that summer.

Clearly not close enough. This past year, I came upon the negatives from that time, all scratched up and deteriorating. I decided to take a look, again.
Marwan Hanna, 2004

Craters

I Was Overcome by A Momentary Panic At The Thought that I Might Be Right. A project by The Atlas Group and Walid Raad in collaboration with Yussef Nassar Until his retirement in 1994, Yussef Nassar was the Lebanese army's most senior explosives and ammunitions expert, the leading investigator of all detonations (primarily car bomb bomb explosions) in Beirut between 1977 and 1993. His strictly technical and non-partisan investigations earned him the trust of militias and as a consequence he was one of the few state officials permitted to move freely during the war years between the different parts of the city.
Over time, combatants and civilians alike viewed Nassar as a fearless and tireless figure. At the same time he was regarded as a tragic figure because he rarely detected in advance and defused a car bomb.
His earnest and exhaustive labor came to be viewed as another casualty of the explosions he investigated as politicians and judges politicized his findings and rarely prosecuted anyone for the car bomb crimes. Throughout his years as an investigator, Nassar produced and preserved a number of texts, photographs, diagrams, sketches, and drawings. These form the basis of the collaboration between Nassar and The Atlas Group. In this exhibition, The Atlas Group and Yussef Nassar present a three-dimensional work inspired by Nassar's diagrams and photographs.

Secrets in the Open Sea

SOS, plate16-21, 1994-2004,archival inkjet prints, Set of 6 plats, 112x175cm, Edition of 5

Secret in the Open Sea consists of 29 photographic prints that were found buried under the rubble during the 1992 demolition of Beirut's war-ravaged commercial districts.
The prints were different shades of blue and each measured 110X175 cm.
The prints were entrusted to The Atlas Group in 1994 for preservation and analysis. In l996, The Atlas Group sent 6 of the prints to laboratories in France for technical analysis. Remarkably, the laboratories recovered small black and white latent images from the blue prints.
The small images represented group portraits of men and women.
The Atlas Group was able to identify all the individuals represented in the small black and white images, and it turned out that they were all individuals who drowned, died or were found dead in the Mediterranean between 1975 and 1991.

My Neck is Thinner than a Hair

My neck is thinner than a hair, 1996-2004, archival inkjet prints, Set of 100 plates, each 24 x 34cm, Edition of 5

My Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair is an on-going investigation by The Atlas Group about the use of car bombs in the 1975-1991 Lebanese wars. With this project, The Atlas Group examines the multiple dimensions of the wars and investigates the public and private events, discourses, objects, and experiences surrounding the 245 car bombs that were detonated during this period. The documents presented here are one part of this investigation. The only part that remains intact after a car bomb explodes is the engine. Landing on balconies, roofs or adjacent streets, the engine is projected tens and sometimes hundreds of meters away from the original site of the bomb. During these wars, photojournalists competed to be the first to find and photograph the engines.With this project the Atlas Group examines the sociological , political, economical and psychological dimmensions of guerilla wars and their catastrophic impulse on the society and on the neighburhood where they detonate..

Already been in a Lake of Fire


Already been in a Lake of Fire, 1999-2002, archival inkjet prints, Set of 9 plates, each 30x42cm, Edition of 7
Document Summary: This notebook contains 145 cutout photographs of cars. They correspond to the exact make, model, and color of every car that was used as a car bomb in the Lebanese wars of 1975 to 1991. Each of the following notebook pages includes a cutout photograph of a car that matches the make, model, and color of a car that was used as a car bomb, as well as text written in Arabic that details the place, time and date of the explosion, the number of casualties, the perimeter of destruction, the exploded car’s engine and axle numbers, and the weight and type of the explosives used.


Already been in a Lake of Fire, 1999-2004, archival inkjet prints, Single print, 111x198cm, Edition of 3

Missing lebanese wars


Missing lebanese wars, 1996-2002, archival inkjet prints, Set of 21 plates, each 33 x 25cm, Edition of 7
It is a little known fact that the major historians of the Lebanese wars were avid gamblers. It is said that they met every Sunday at the race track -- Marxists and Islamists bet on races one through seven; Maronite nationalists and socialists on races eight through fifteen. Race after race, the historians stood behind the track photographer, whose job was to image the winning horse as it crossed the finish line, to record the photo-finish. It is also said that they convinced (some say bribed) the photographer to snap only one picture as the winning horse arrived. Each historian wagered on precisely when --how many fractions of a second before or after the horse crossed the finish line -- the photographer would expose his frame. Each of the following notebook pages includes a photograph clipped from the post-race-day issue of the newspaper, Annahar, Dr. Fakhouri’s notations on the race’s distance and duration, the winning time of the winning horse, calculations of averages, the historians’ initials with their respective bets, the time discrepancy predicted by the winning historian. Written on each page is also a brief paragraph in English. Dr. Fakhouri’s widow, Zainab Fakhouri, has attributed these to her husband’s habit of including short descriptions of the winning historians in his notebooks.

Missing lebanese wars, 1996-2002, archival inkjet prints, Single print, 112 x 127cm , Edition of 3

Civilizationally, We Do Not dig Holes to Bury Ourselves


Civilizationally, We Do Not dig Holes to Bury Ourselves, 1959- 2002, archival inkjet prints, Set of 24 plates, each 28 x 21,5 cm, Edition of 7
The only available photographs of Dr. Fadl Fakhouri are a series of self-portrait photographs that he produced in 1959 during his one and only trip to France. The photographs were preserved in a small brown envelope titled in Arabic “Never That I Remember.”