Walid Raad founded the Atlas Group in 1989 to (ostensibly) document the contemporary history of Lebanon, particularly its civil war of 1975-1990. This archive brings together found and produced photographic, audio-visual and written records, including snapshots from the private albums of the (fictional) Lebanese historian Dr. Fadl Fakhouri and the videotapes of Souheil Bachar, who was (allegedly) a hostage in Beirut in 1985. Raad’s works are characterized by an aura of the documentary, all the better to fracture their credibility; to question the authenticity of the written, pictorial and audiovisual document; and to ask how history–in particular history marked by the trauma and the contradictory narratives of civil war–can be represented. Raad was born in 1967 in Chbanieh, and lives in New York and Beirut. The Atlas Group includes 11 photographic and video works from the last 10 years and two new photo series.

Walid Raad (born 1967 in Lebanon) produces performances, video and photographs. He founded The Atlas Group in 1999, a fictitious archive consisting of lectures, documentaries and installations about the civil war in Lebanon. With this archive he has created an alternative world, although the texts and picture material he employs are in a conventional format. This enables Raad to portray the conflict in Lebanon not as a historical fact but as an abstract composition of memories and media reports. In The Fakhouri File Walid Raad documents the historical figure of Dr. Fadi Fakhouri, a leading Lebanese historian of the civil war up till his death in 1998, through the medium of notebooks, videos and photographs. English, French and Arabic text

The Hasselblad Award is an international photography award. Since 1980 it has been presented annually, with the exception of the year of Erna Hasselblad’s death, 1983. The Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photo graphy is recognized as one of the most important prizes for photography in the world today. The Hasselblad Award is granted to “a photographer recognized for major achievements”. This may be an individual who has made a pioneering achievement in photography, who has had a decisive impact on younger generations of photographers, or who has implemented one or more internationally significant photographic projects. Lebanese/American artist Walid Raad has been selected as the 31st winner of the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. The award was presented to Raad in New York on 8 March 2011. Each year an exhibition of works by the award winner opens at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg and a book is released. This year, as in the last four years, a book will be produced as a co-operation between the Hasselblad Foundation and Steidl. Walid Raad is one of the most original and singular practitioners using photography today. His project “The Atlas Group”, in which Raad generated original ideas about the relationships between documentary photography, archive and history, has been widely acclaimed. In order to document and investigate Lebanon’s contemporary history, Raad has developed innovative methods of approaching war imagery and exploring political and social conflict. Raad’s work allows us to question the traditional iconography of war photography and speculate on visuality, memory and violence. The dead weight of this quarrel hangs contains several unpublished works from The Atlas Group project. Walid Raad, born in Chbanieh, Lebanon in 1967, works with photography, video, text, installation, and performance. He has exhibited in many prominent national and international exhibitions. In 2007 Raad won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and received the Alpert Award. In 2009 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Raad lives in New York and has been Associate Professor of Art at The Cooper Union School of Art since 2002.

This critical anthology addresses three often-overlooked issues facing archival organizations: the question of inclusion in or exclusion from the archive; the loss of individuality and specificity in the archive; the danger of homogenization; and the risk that archiving may foster a form of pigeonholing. Since the archive is a fundamental symbolic entity, on the basis of which we organize our lives, the past, the present and the future, these issues require exploration. Productive Archiving proposes that artistic treatments of (and interventions in) archives can offer innovative ways to foster new connections and ways of thinking and organizing. Authors include: Aleida Assmann, Annet Dekker, Lars Ebert, Sebastián Díaz Morales, Monika Huber, William Kentridge, Pablo Lerma, Inge Meijer, Santu Mofokeng, Merapi Obermayer, Walid Raad, Ana Paula Saab, Drew Sawyer, Carla Subrizi, Marjan Teeuwen, Daria Tuminas, Jeffrey Wallen. Visual essays by: Sebastían Díaz Morales, Monika Huber, William Kentridge, Pablo Lerma, Inge Meijer, Marjan Teeuwen and Santu Mofokeng.

This eye-catching booklet is published with an exhibition of hybrid wooden objects by Walid Raad. The Lebanese-American artist’s practice spans almost every discipline, from photographs, videos, and lectures, to performances, sculptures, collages, and drawings. Raad’s approach is based on the assumption that artworks are not constants, but rather mutable quantities that change meaning and thus also their form during cultural or physical transfer. For instance, in dealing with the Lebanese wars, he uses the format of a seemingly authentic archive to confront the Western viewer with a society that has lost a unifying narrative.

Based in New York, the Lebanese-born artist Walid Raad (1967) often deals with the significance of locale in his work, and particularly with how different forms of violence or disruptive events can affect the lives of objects, ideas, or artworks. The artists appearances during and literally in the midst of his exhibitions are also an integral part of his practice. This extensive catalogue is published on the occasion of Lets be honest, the weather helped, shown at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and offers a comprehensive overview of three long-term projects by Raad, along with a live performance piece entitled Kicking the Dead and/or Les Louvres.

On Photography traces the artistic and institutional decisions that have influenced the Camera Austria association. Since its founding in the mid-1970s as an association of Austrian photographers, the group has had an important place in the European photography world, putting on exhibitions and symposia on topics in photography and, since 1980, publishing the magazine Camera Austria International. Operating through a network of photographers, academics and art critics from all over the world, Camera Austria has come to function like a laboratory shaping photographic culture. At the center of the book are the photographers that Camera Austria has worked with, whether in exhibitions, at symposia or in the magazine―among them Robert Adams, Nobuyoshi Araki, Lewis Baltz, William Eggleston, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Seiichi Furuya, Luigi Ghirri, David Goldblatt, Nan Goldin, Zofia Kulik, Tatiana Lecomte, Susan Meiselas, Peter Piller, Walid Raad, Michael Schmidt, Allan Sekula, Ahlam Shibli, Lieko Shiga, Manfred Willmann and Tobias Zielony.

Taking that ambiguous thing we call “the exhibition” as a critical medium, artists have often radically rethought conventional forms of exhibition making. The Artist as Curator: An Anthology, born out of a series of essays originally published in Mousse, surveys seminal examples of such artist-curated exhibitions from the postwar to the present, examined by the world’s foremost curators and illustrated with rare documents and illustrations.

Artists featured include the Avant-Garde Argentinian Visual Artists Group; Mel Bochner; Marcel Broothaers; John Cage; Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and the CalArts Feminist Art Program; Collaborative Projects Inc. (Colab); Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno; Group Material; Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore; David Hammons; Martin Kippenberger; Mark Leckey; Hélio Oiticica; Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari; Martha Rosler; and Andy Warhol, among other examples drawn from around the globe.

Greater New York 2005, jointly organized by P.S.1 and The Museum of Modern Art, New York went on view March 13, 2005, showcasing 150 artists who have emerged since 2000. Their work explores this specific time period, during which New York City has changed dramatically; shows vitality, energy, and exciting promise; and anticipates new artistic directions. The exhibition includes artists from New York’s five boroughs, as well as nearby towns in New Jersey, and builds from the spirit of its first incarnation, Greater New York, which opened at P.S.1 in 2000, shortly after the two institutions became affiliated. This accompanying catalogue documents trends, process, and media explored by the artists in the exhibition. Each artist featured in the exhibition receives a two-page spread that includes images, text, and biographical information. Among the 160 participating artists included are Dana Schutz, Taylor McKinens, Jules de Balincourt, Jen DeNike, Steve Mumford, Peter Rostovsky, Saya Woolfalk, Wangechi Mutu, Wade Guyton, Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Christian Jankowski and many more.

From nineteenth-century double-exposures that allegedly captured ghosts to painted, airbrushed and digitally altered images and reality TV, the credibility and objectivity of documentary photography and film are always in question. The development of ‘in-between’ genres such as the docudrama has further complicated the matter, as has documentary work finding its way into museums. Most recently, the proliferation of digital media has increased the publicís awareness of how easy it is to manipulate images. Documentary Now! assesses and analyzes the situation. What do we understand by ìdocumentaryî these days? Is it possible or desirable to define? What tendencies are emerging within documentary forms? And what is the social function of the documentary? Authorities including Olivier Lugon, Frits Gierstberg and Tom Holert share their views on developments in the field, and ten photographers and artists, including Walid Raad, Johan Grimonprez, Julika Rudelius and Allan Sekula describe their own approaches to the use of documentary film and photography. This book has a surprisingly satisfying feel, and features a color plate section and red ribbon-marker.

The Luminous Interval accompanies the Guggenheim Museum’s eponymous exhibition of works drawn from the D. Daskalopoulos collection. Daskalopoulos’ collecting practices are inspired in part by the writings of the Greek philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis, who envisioned life as the “luminous interval” bridging the twin abysses of birth and death. Balancing renderings of chaotic fragmentation with forms defined by geometric containment and restraint, the works explore the coexistence of hope and despair within the human condition. Encompassing works in various media by more than 30 artists, including Steve McQueen, Wangechi Mutu, Rivane Neuenschwander and Walid Raad, the result is a survey of some of the most salient artistic developments of recent decades. This fully illustrated catalogue features an interview with Daskalopoulos and critical essays by philosopher Simon Critchley with Jamieson Webster and art critic Brian Sholis.

Was it Joseph Cornell’s dossiers on ballerinas and artists that first proposed the model of the archive as a creative storehouse, a vehicle for the ordering of chaotic fragments? Over the past 30 years, successive generations have taken wide-ranging approaches to archives, most of them (like Cornell) concentrating on photographic and filmic collections. Organized and written by renowned scholar and ICP Adjunct Curator Okwui Enwezor, and taking its title from Jacques Derrida’s book of the same name, Archive Fever gathers leading contemporary artists who use archival materials in the fabrication of their work. As Derrida notes, the Greek etymology of “archive” connotes both “commencement” and “commandment,” implying that authority is as much at stake as authenticity. For artists, of course, these imperatives provoke all kinds of exciting opportunities for eccentricity and falsification, and the works included herein take many forms, including physical archives arranged by bizarre cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums and photomontages composed from historical photographs. These images offer a wide-ranging subject matter, but are linked by the artists’ shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive. Artists include Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Zoe Leonard, Ilan Lieberman, Walid Raad, Thomas Ruff, Anri Sala, Fazal Sheikh, Eyal Sivan, Lorna Simpson and Vivan Sundaram, among others.