Walid Raad: Miraculous beginnings

On Walid Raad

The new exhibition in the Whitechapel Gallery by Walid Raad has so many layers that I wonder if every visitor gets all of it.
At first it all seems like a very serious exhibition on the history of Lebanon, when we are looking at a lot of archival material of all the atrocities that happened in civil war.
But it already starts when you enter the exhibition and you see this scheme about the way ‘they’ have documented all this archive material and filed it. They, The Atlas Group, already pose a problem. Who are they? Actually, a fictional group which is only Walid Raad. So, this Atlas Group found out a lot of things on the Lebanon war. But who made the pictures of the car bombs? Who made the video tape of the hostage? Who found the pictures with the drowned people in them? Everything gets confusing. But you believe the art institute will always tell the truth. So you continue to take things seriously.
When you enter the other large room of the exhibition upstairs things start to get really confusing. A scale model of the exhibition is shown on a table in the middle of the room. Including miniatures of the car bomb series, and even smaller versions of the videos downstairs are playing. When you read the text on the wall, it says that Walid Raad refused an exhibition in a new museum in Lebanon a couple of times. When he finally agreed, and unpacked the works after shipping, he found out all of his artworks had shrunk to a very small size! So he was very uncertain about what to do. In the end he decided to make a small museum to make the shrunken artworks fit. Now, what is this all about? Did the artworks of Walid Raad actually shrink?
When I went to see Walid Raad speak last Friday at the artist talk in the Whitechapel Gallery, it was all very natural. He spoke about the shrinking of his artworks, and nobody got up to ask him what the hell he was talking about. At first I did not understand what he was talking about, but later on I just sat listening like it was completely normal his artworks had shrunk. Now this is exactly what I found so extremely interesting about Walid Raad. He is a hugely intellectual person, but also a good speaker with a very flexible mind. He makes us think: ok, so now these artworks are so small, what should we do with the museum? Can we let it shrink as well? When we were discussing the exhibition with Daniel Herrmann at the Whitechapel, he said: Is Walid Raad even Lebanese? Nobody ever checked it. He has lived almost his whole life in the United States. Are these actually pictures of smoke from bombs? Maybe it is just a barbeque.
But it is not the point. It is the way he assembles things, put them together. Creates stories. Makes people think: about Lebanon, about art, about the art institution.