(We Decided To Let Them Say “We Are Convinced” Twice.  It was More Convincing This Way.) A project by Walid Raad
EAST GALLERY
November 10 – February 4, 2007

Walid Raad. Untitled and/or artillery I. 2005. Chromogenic print.
Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Walid Raad works with video, photography, and literary essays to investigate the contemporary history of war in his native Lebanon.  (We Decided To Let Them Say “We Are Convinced” Twice.   It Was More Convincing This Way.), a series of 15 large-scale photographs, specifically recalls the Israeli Army’s invasion and siege of Beirut in 1982. That summer Raad, an intrepid 15-year-old with a telephoto lens, took photographs of near and distant military activity in West Beirut from his home in the eastern sector. Recently reprinting the pictures from the original, now degraded negatives, he discovered that the images’ unusual discoloration, creases, and holes offered a disturbing but realistic representation of a broken world rendered flat by the series of catastrophes that had befallen it.

Walid Raad. Untitled and/or onlookers. 2005. Chromogenic print.
Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Highly regarded for his project The Atlas Group, Raad grapples with the representation of traumatic events of collective historical dimensions and the ways film, video, and photography function as documents of physical and psychological violence.