Walid Raad and the “Flying War Volkswagen”

An exceptional artistic return by Lebanese visual artist Walid Raad, after forty years or so spent in New York, to exhibit his work once again at the Venice Biennale, then at the Festival d'Automne in Paris. A major exhibition that opens with the "inverted chassis" of a Volkswagen Beetle, in an avant-garde visual art space rich with inventive ideas born from the shaping of imaginaries, denouncing the organisation of wars and new bombs, without any faltering in the balance or mechanisms of conception. It is an art that weaves the play of ideas with fictional archives around the geopolitics of the Middle East and the "war market" — a market that endures on the terrain of artistic competition, allowing the best to triumph illusorily in the invention of imaginaries, imaginaries distinguished by a poetic irony constructed in the gaps of Lebanese memory.

Who does not remember the bombardment launched by the American navy following the first bloody and suicidal attacks carried out by the doctrinaire Hezbollah movement in February 1984 against American Marine forces stationed in Lebanon — attacks after which the warship USS New Jersey, bound for Lebanese shores, fired sixteen 300-inch shells towards Syrian and Druze positions, shells each weighing as much as a Volkswagen Beetle? Hence the name the Lebanese gave to these projectiles: the "flying Volkswagens".

One of these shells fell in the garden of the teenage boy in the village of Bmariam in Mount Lebanon. Walid Raad and his cousins then turned the bomb crater into a swimming pool to play in.

This is the war that can be re-experienced, or played in, in order to inhabit peace after the fact — with a great artist, a major figure in Lebanese contemporary art, born in 1967, passionate and convinced by his firm belief that human truth is under attack. War thus becomes something ordinary. This is how things present themselves in the reports of power. As though it were error itself that was being staged. No less seductive than truth, so long as approaching it is an entirely different matter.

Since 1993, Walid Raad has lived in the United States, returning to Lebanon roughly every month, where members of his family still live in Beirut. In 1997, he participated in the activities of the Arab Image Foundation, which aims to collect and evaluate the visual heritage of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora.

For decades, his works — exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at Documenta in Kassel — have distinguished themselves as the output of a central figure in the SFA, Arab Science Fiction, a current that critiques official narratives and is recognised in particular through the artistic inventions of a group of Lebanese artists living there or members of the diaspora, all sharing the same obsession with the gaps in their country's memory. He has shared exhibition spaces with many colleagues, such as Rabih Mroué, Akram Zaatari, Khalil Joreige, and Joana Hadjithomas, and is currently alongside some of them at the Psykalis Bay Foundation in Milan, as part of the exhibition "Crossroads: Beirut Contemporary". The exhibition evokes "a city shaped by cycles of construction, destruction and post-war reconstruction not as a linear heritage, but through damaged archives, unstable ground, fragile materials, and temporal discontinuities".

Walid Raad is known as an "inventor of fake news about the Middle East", creator of fictitious archives around the war he experienced in his childhood, situated within a movement of free art — in the manner of free poetry — forming part of the political, social and cultural narratives of a youth torn between commitment, realistic utopia, and rebellion.

He currently exhibits black-and-white archival photographs of an American fleet, in what resembles an intimate perception of narratives mixing weapons and childhoods. But where does the boundary begin between fiction and reality in what the eye perceives of the dense fires of war in the Middle East, the means of survival, and an image still visible there — visible through the many layers of a frozen memory, haunted by the chasm of the war crater and of play? He rests his gaze to rediscover what remains of that childhood once stripped of its false pretensions. Beauty draws its source only from the singular wound visible in his works, where he decides to break from withdrawal from the world and proclaim a provisional solitude, however deep.

This is the same era of the nineteen-eighties, when the Lebanese armed militias assigned code names to the leaders of the various factions, each bearing the name of a flower. Raad writes in the exhibition catalogue that the woman responsible for devising this coding system had studied botany at the American University of Beirut, and had also made a collage of Hosni Mubarak's portraits with a peony head. He recounts how Yasser Arafat, the target of numerous assassination attempts, never slept in the same bed twice, and how an obsessive historian had reconstructed these various layers by browsing — in the manner of Sophie Calle — hotel rooms in Paris and Cairo to capture the photographs he exhibits, which resemble documents from that period. These observations appear as "reliable" information, until one realises that he is playing in the "excavations of war", just as the child had played in the "bomb crater". These "falsified" photographs, these "empty beds" sometimes occupied by "PLO leaders" during an "impossible warrior's rest", allow one to glimpse, through them, an entire people. One searches for "surviving corpses", or for "a cause that never sleeps".

Some of these images are authentic, others have been fashioned to become so in the labyrinths of fiction — as he had been doing since 1989, the year in which he founded his collective named "The Atlas Group", a gathering of "fictitious researchers" (dissolved in 2004 and counting only one member: Walid Raad himself). Today, more simply, he archives new falsified archives in the face of the "scarcity of reliable archives" on the contemporary history of Lebanon.

Through the technique of Arab Science Fiction (SFA), Walid Raad poses, in a post-war context, questions about political structures, memory and reparation in a country that has witnessed successive wars. Through an approach at once satirical, modernist, mythological and poetic, worked through by a recurring obsession, all of these works respond in their own way to the logic of trauma and the rhythmic and compositional repetition of yesterday's war — or tomorrow's — within destinies from which death is erased in its pain, in a mockery of fate and history, because the war has never stopped and the fabricated truths remain too harsh to express the eternal conflict.

Raad stands against a fragile symbolism, that is, against stopping at the memory of childhood alone — the child cannot live without growing somewhat. He is nothing but a toymaker, and what importance does that have, as Nietzsche would say? Raad plays the role of artistic authority in all that it implies, contains and demands. Not in the sense of a decisive political statement, but according to the dramatic givens of the state of war, as an instrument of irony against the game of the absurd and the violations, blunders and aggressions it commits. This might help to rid oneself of the feeling of discouragement — and if we could manage that, everything might be possible in Lebanon.

Six other Lebanese artists will join Walid Raad at the Venice Biennale, an ensemble that says something of the strategic position of this artistic arena in contemporary debates around memory, archive, narrative and forms of expression in a harsh geopolitical context, that of the ongoing wars.