As a young person, Walid Raad would stroll round his hometown with a digicam, simply making an attempt to make some sense of the world. At a look, the black-and-white footage he captured then provide cool, indifferent views. However he rapidly found there was solely a lot sense to be product of war-torn Beirut. Someday, strolling by a bakery, he snapped a cake displayed within the window. It was embellished with birthday needs for somebody named Hassan. Solely later, growing the movie at residence—his dad had transformed the lavatory to a darkroom, encouraging his passion—did Raad register the date: The cake was for Hassan Nasrallah, then a rising militiaman within the Lebanese Civil Battle. Raad briefly fantasized about poisoning it. “However I used to be 15,” he instructed me, laughing. “I used to be a coward.”
A long time later, with a PhD and a MoMA retrospective underneath his belt, Raad returned to that picture in a collection of digitally fabricated birthday muffins addressed to political leaders who really feel tough to rejoice: completely satisfied birthday to Ali, Kamal, Tony, Walid; joyeux anniversaire to Yasser, Elias, Nabih, Amine. By then, Nasrallah had turn into the chief of Hezbollah; in 2024, he was killed in an Israeli airstrike. Raad’s colourful muffins are without delay cheerful and chilly—his trademark tragicomic mix of fiction and reality. In his muffins, as in a lot of his work, grand political occasions unfold on an intimate, human scale.
Begun, in a way, when Raad was simply 15, the cake challenge has every thing of his signature: He begins with one thing true—a doc—then extrapolates its logic to create one thing fictional, possibly even somewhat fantastical. That technique has carried him by an almost 40-year profession and counting.
Walid Raad/The Atlas Group: Pageant of Gratitude, 2003/2021.
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York/©Walid Raad; Reverse: Photograph Steven Probert Studio/Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York/©Walid Raad
His work is a standout in the primary present on this 12 months’s Venice Biennale: His work, drawings, and images of banal-seeming beds spring to life while you learn a wall textual content claiming that they have been slept in by Yasser Arafat, who “is alleged to have by no means slept in the identical mattress two nights in a row.” The PLO chief survived greater than 40 assassination makes an attempt, and “he couldn’t afford to throw warning to the wind… so he lived—and slept—on the transfer.” Raad provides that he has spent 30 years looking for the beds Arafat slept in, drafting work of his mattresses and duvets that he simply couldn’t appear to finish.
With the beds and muffins alike, the story unfolds fairly actually alongside the photographs’ edges: The work of the beds are incomplete, bordered with tape and brushstrokes. The birthday muffins seem pulled out of manila envelopes together with piles of images, as if being entered into proof at a trial. Raad says he’s “creating the paperwork I needed already existed.”
Walid Raad: Removed from quieting_Tunis, 1969–2026.
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York/©Walid Raad
SINGLING OUT RAAD’S Arafat footage in the Biennale, the scholar Saidiya Hartman described his “perception within the imaginative and the speculative” as “vital.” Hartman has devoted her life’s work to imagining the lives of oppressed individuals who left restricted traces within the archive—individuals who have been silenced or illiterate, individuals whose voices have been solely recorded underneath situations of coercion, or individuals who essentially lived clandestine lives—like Arafat. She calls her strategy “vital fabulation.”
Certainly, Raad is greatest identified for his personal technique of fabulation, marrying tales and footage, imaginations and histories. This manner of working has every thing to do together with his major topic: the Arab world and its politics and conflicts—significantly the Lebanese Civil Battle (1975—90) that unfolded in Raad’s youth. Whereas floods of pictures and their competing narratives have all however outlined the digital age, this battleground of misinformation has had notable penalties within the area. “In the course of the struggle,” remembers Khalil Joreige, one other Lebanese artist exhibiting within the Venice Biennale this 12 months, “each militia had its personal media station, tv, newspaper, or radio. There was an actual struggle of pictures”—a struggle Joreige says influenced his technology’s “refined relationship to photographs.”
Accordingly, the Harvard artwork historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty has described Raad’s work as an exemplar of “parafiction,” including that one of the highly effective issues artwork can do is get viewers to expertise a given situation as having been true—and remind them that different worlds are potential. In her latest ebook on creative analysis, artwork historian Claire Bishop singled out Raad too, noting that, whereas a lot work within the style reproduces the expertise of knowledge overload—suppose: paperwork in vitrines—Raad provides synthesis within the type of narrative, all with out collapsing into the trope of authoritative grasp narratives in opposition to which a lot research-based artwork reacts.
In my very own ebook, Fables & Forensics, I describe Raad’s work as a form of surrealism for the knowledge age, noting how he offers playful kind to the unusual if dizzying glut of misinformation—however including that he does so with out ever falling into the lure of reproducing pretend information. Any reality—a mattress, or a birthday cake—that could possibly be mistaken for true is of little consequence, and there are all the time clues as to the constructed nature of his paperwork; simply keep in mind to take a look at the sides.
View of Raad’s set up Postscript to the Arabic Version, 1938–2025, within the 61st Venice Biennale.
Photographs Marco Zorzanello/Courtesy Venice Biennale
Raad is greatest identified for the work he made as a fictional collective known as the Atlas Group, work that presses on pictures’s fraught relationship with fact. The Group’s video Hostage: The Bachar tapes (#17 and #31), which they attribute to the 12 months 2000, sees Souheil Bachar narrate his expertise of being held hostage in Lebanon from 1983 to ’93 alongside 5 Western males; he was the one Arab. Some scenes merely present Bachar in opposition to a white wall, although the video reveals itself as clearly manipulated by means of green-screened footage of Ronald Reagan. There are much less apparent clues, too: In case you don’t converse Arabic, you may miss how Bachar’s phrases are at occasions contradicted by the English translation.
The Group, Raad says, ran from 1989 to 2004. However dates, like all information, are his medium. You’ll additionally discover magazines and museums that hint the Group’s origin to 1967, the 12 months of Raad’s beginning, or to 1948, or 1945. And the Group has attributed archival pictures to nonexistent establishments—just like the Museum of Fantastic Artwork New York. Each the Tate and the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in New York have acquired editions of his collection “My Neck Is Thinner than a Hair: Engines,” however every lists the work with totally different dates (2000—03 and 1996—2004, respectively). And although Raad says he discontinued the Atlas Group in 2004, a piece from the Group seems within the 2026 Venice Biennale catalog, with the date “printed 2023”—leaving it ambiguous as to when it was made, and whether or not the Group has actually disbanded in any respect.
Walid Raad/The Atlas Group: Let’s be sincere, the climate helped_Saudi Arabia, 1998.
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York/©Walid Raad
Nonetheless, one date is evident: Over the previous 20 years—since a 2005 catalyst—Raad’s work has solely grown stranger. The Atlas Group primed viewers to learn his paperwork as unstable, however the later work asks them to deal with shrunken objects, resurrected work, and vampires lurking within the archive. One thing has shifted, and the outdated language of reality and fiction solely scratches the floor.
IN A RESTORED Nineteenth-century barn perched on a peak within the so-called “Irish Alps” in upstate New York, Raad retains a meticulous archive. About an hour’s drive from Bard Faculty, the place he teaches, he and his spouse duplicated the barn’s flooring plan to construct a second construction close by: their residence. The view from their porch is straight out of a Hudson River College portray, and assembly him for the primary time appears like a peek backstage: For over 20 years, he has diligently hidden his likeness from all corners of the web, populating the algorithm with different faces to throw it off his scent. He defined his evasiveness in a single phrase—“phobia”—nevertheless it was arduous to not see it as only one extra manner Raad makes use of pictures to make the world really feel bigger and stranger, moderately than to attempt to “seize” it. In individual, he’s heat and welcoming, serving home made tabbouleh and hummus “the appropriate manner”—with sumac and olive oil.
Within the barn, Raad has assiduously organized ephemeral supplies like wall labels from his exhibitions and title playing cards from dinners he’s attended, all fodder which will or might not turn into an art work sooner or later. A strappy leather-based portfolio contained his juvenilia, together with these footage he made as a young person. He went to highschool in Boston—“They’d a darkroom and so they had a basketball workforce, so it was nice,” he mentioned—the place he made footage within the model of Cindy Sherman, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Stephen Shore, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Lucas Samaras. Raad was in a position to approximate all of their types, however what he carried from the train most clearly was the expertise of embodying a persona from behind the digicam.
A 2026 self-portrait by Walid Raad.
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York/©Walid Raad
In 1985, Raad began his undergraduate diploma on the Rochester Institute of Know-how, the place he majored in medication earlier than switching to pictures. Whereas there, he gained his first pictures prize, for a piece he made underneath the pseudonym P.X. Chesterfield, impressed by an actual US Marine Corps normal, P.X. Kelley, whose title he thought sounded cool. Quickly after, he enrolled within the College of Rochester’s “Cultural and Visible Research” PhD program, which sported rising-star college: Craig Owens, Kaja Silverman, Douglas Crimp. It “was psychoanalysis, linguistics, and Marxism,” Raad defined. “The holy trinity.” For Raad, persona, idea, and pictures have been beginning to converge.
As a scholar, Raad visited and photographed Beirut every summer season, a observe he continues to at the present time. Again residence, he tried aping observational strategies from Diane Arbus or Eugène Atget that he’d noticed in pictures magazines his dad gave him. However he discovered that “even one thing so simple as utilizing a tripod was not possible… in a metropolis that’s stuffed with snipers.” He wasn’t making struggle pictures, both, by no means capturing the actions, all the time the aftermath.
After taking footage of detonated bombs, nonetheless, Raad was usually left with the sense that one thing was lacking, so he began getting his fingers on the images—circling detritus with a pink pencil. Kernels of his most well-known works are palpable in his teenage years, which appears acceptable for an artist who describes himself as beginning out with an curiosity in “a sure mind-set about violence and trauma.” Variations of these pink circles recur within the Atlas Group’s Let’s Be Sincere, the Climate Helped (1998/2006), black-and-white snapshots of Beirut marked with brightly coloured dots equivalent to the code system that ammunition producers use to establish cartridges and shells—and thus, not directly, their makers. In Raad’s fingers, the dots learn as a lot confetti as forensic notations.
Beneath the Atlas Group, Raad was crafting personas just like the playing historian Dr. Fadl Fakhouri and the unfortunate police detective Yussef Bitar—“very critical, very skilled individuals,” he defined—the type more likely to go away behind official paperwork. However ultimately, he discovered the Atlas Group “considerably restricted,” and have become interested by displaying how “violence has extra insidious results than we all know.” In addition to, he added, by the early aughts, he felt that “the language of maps and archives had been exhausted.”
RAAD’S THINKING BEGAN to shift after assembly, within the early ’90s, the Lebanese author and artist Jalal Toufic whereas engaged on a video challenge concerning the occupation of South Lebanon. He began studying Toufic’s books, which he discovered tough to parse at first, however ultimately, he discovered Forthcoming (2000). That ebook consists of the story of a classically educated photographer who can’t cease making blurry footage of buildings in Beirut. Raad immediately acknowledged himself.
“I freaked out,” Raad instructed me. “It was as if he might hear my inner monologue.” He considered how sure photographic tropes—one thing so simple as a tripod—had been rendered unavailable to him in wartime Beirut, however quickly was considering extra expansively about all that violence had withdrawn from him. His trinity-training in Rochester had taught him that “language, psyche, the financial system… that’s the stuff of the world.” Toufic, he mentioned, gave him language for “a special place that I’d by no means been launched to.”
Toufic has influenced nearly every thing Raad has made since that encounter. “I’m embarrassed by how a lot I speak about that man,” he instructed me. “It’s as if I can’t have a thought with out passing by him.” Of lasting influence was Toufic’s idea of “withdrawal,” spelled out most explicitly in The Withdrawal of Custom Previous a Surpassing Catastrophe (2009) but in addition addressed in earlier essays. In it, he describes the types of immaterial losses that may come up within the wake of main cultural upheavals—the ways in which rituals and types can turn into unavailable or lose their efficiency when the society that gave rise to them is modified irreversibly by catastrophe.
Custom, Toufic theorizes, could be clung to steadfastly within the aftermath of catastrophe, as within the revival of Orthodox Judaism within the wake of the Holocaust; or it could be suppressed totally, as in variations of modernism that, additionally within the wake of the world wars, strive in useless to think about a clear slate and abolish antecedents. When a practice comes again to life in a brand new context, one thing is all the time off: Toufic calls the act a “resurrection,” as a result of the custom just isn’t alive a lot as undead. The artist’s job is to make this withdrawal palpable—to make the absence current, “just like the mirror in vampire movies”; for Toufic, solely those that try to fail to resurrect withdrawn custom “might turn into actually completely fashionable.”
This idea of withdrawal knowledgeable the pivotal work Raad confirmed on the Arab world’s first white dice gallery, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, which opened in 2005. He’d declined the invitation a number of occasions earlier than ultimately acquiescing in 2008, sensing that one thing appeared off. When he arrived on the gallery, he discovered that the Atlas Group’s work he shipped had been shrunk to 1/a hundredth of its authentic measurement. After I pressed Raad on how this could possibly be potential, he mentioned that “there are situations underneath which your personal work is not obtainable to you, and your solely relation to it feels distorted.” For him, this isn’t “a symptom, and never a metaphor.” It’s additionally “not quantum,” nor a situation of “one’s psyche, materials situations, or language”—it’s, he mentioned, “withdrawal.” Withdrawal can also be the very motive he couldn’t full these Arafat mattress work.
The affinities between Raad and Toufic are hanging sufficient that a couple of individual has confessed their suspicion that Toufic is just one other of Raad’s personas—a idea that might require an elaborate ruse if true, with Raad hiring a physique double to look alongside him at public occasions. However whereas Raad is undoubtedly expert at crafting fictions and personas, he’s much less interested by pranks than in fables—in what occurs when one thing is imagined as having been true moderately than in trickery and phantasm.
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York/©Walid Raad
AFTER THE ATLAS GROUP mined the archive and rendered it unusual, Raad’s work went past scrambling reality and fiction and towards one thing extra like magical realism. Alongside the way in which, pictures—which is so arduous to learn with out eager about fact—grew to become much less central. Higher be watching the clouds time and again (2000/2017) is a collection of collages attributed to a fictional Lebanese Military officer named Fadwa Hassoun, who’d educated as a botanist. In the course of the struggle, Hassoun assigned politicians flowers as code names, and the work that tells her story options black-and-white portraits of Benjamin Netanyahu, Saddam Hussein, Ronald Reagan, and extra with their heads topped by colourful petals, their legs made to appear like stems.
Extra just lately, Raad collaborated with graphic designer Pierre Huyghebaert on I assumed I’d escape my destiny (once more) (2025), an set up that gathers statements from individuals concerned in exhibitions and applications canceled over expressions of solidarity with Palestine. Printed, minimize out, and taped low alongside a gallery baseboard, these quotes are arduous to learn with out crouching. What catches the attention as a substitute are the coloured strips of tape operating throughout the wall, like placeholders for the artworks that by no means received to hold in such an area. It’s one other instance of how catastrophe can present up in artwork sideways, of Toufic’s concept that battle leaves traces which might be seen in artworks and cultural traditions solely within the type of absence—{that a} “actually fashionable” art work may make this absence seen.
Walid Raad (in collaboration with Pierre Huyghebaert): I assumed I’d escape my destiny (once more), 2025; in “we refuse_d,” 2025–26, at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Fashionable Artwork, Doha.
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Fashionable Artwork, Doha/©Walid Raad
Toufic’s vampire-mirror concept resurfaces too in different works of Raad’s on show in Venice, alongside the Arafat items. Copies of stolen Arab and Turkish artworks seem painted on the undersides of picket pallets. Right here, as in a number of latest works, the vampire Raad holds a mirror as much as is fashionable Arab artwork itself, which these days has undergone a interval of “rediscovery,” to make use of the artwork world’s favourite time period—or, resurrection. When the Lebanese Civil Battle resulted in 1990, a wall textual content informs, militias offered off weapons, a lot of which discovered their approach to the Balkans; the Yugoslav Wars, then, have been fought partly with Lebanese arms. The textual content provides that the painted pallets have been just lately present in Ljubljana, on the Moderna Galerija—the place, conveniently, he simply closed a mid-career retrospective.
Subsequent spring, at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, Raad will place a classic VW Beetle on its again within the gallery like a dying bug—a reference to “flying Volkswagens,” as American troopers known as the artillery shells they fired on Beirut within the Eighties. Surrounding them on the partitions shall be reproductions of handwritten notes left on bombs by troopers in numerous languages, together with English, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, and French—like xoxo, or the dildo of penalties not often arrives lubed, or from silicon valley with love. Raad discovered pictures on Reddit posted by braggadocious troopers from all over the world, after which exaggerated the dimensions and altered the colour of their inscriptions. There isn’t an entire lot of fiction or fantasy on this one: Generally, the information are unusual sufficient.
