Walid Raad is an artist and academic known for work that blurs the lines between fact and fiction, memory and archive, in order to explore histories of violence, narrative, and representation in the Arab world and beyond. Best known for his long-term project The Atlas Group, Raad constructs fictional archives and personas to examine how traumatic histories—particularly those of Lebanon’s civil wars—are recorded and perceived. Often using performance, photography, text, and video, his practice destabilizes the authority of documents, challenging the politics of memory, authorship, and cultural institutions. His work has been widely exhibited, including at the Venice Biennale, Documenta, MoMA, and the Louvre. Raad is also a professor at Cooper Union in New York and a foundational voice in critical contemporary discourse.
