the atlas group

rupture

teeth puller outer
it's great work. very playful in its way. from what i understand the Atlas Group is essentially Walid Raad's solo project. Bidoun magazine did a piece on him recently, and I think the NYTimes or somewhere had a blurb as well, several months ago.
 
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mms

sometimes
rupture said:
it's great work. very playful in its way. from what i understand the Atlas Group is essentially Walid Raad's solo project. Bidoun magazine did a piece on him recently, and I think the NYTimes or somewhere had a blurb as well, several months ago.


a mag i picked up called cabinet did a piece on the car bomb photos.
it's an inspiring mag as it goes, outta nyc. http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/
sick squid english sterling.
 
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pfflam

Member
Hello people

I'm new here . . . .



I also saw Walid Raad give a presentation of the Atlas Group . . . it was a lecture/performance that included video from 'serveillance' cameras re-edited by 'off-duty 'guards, etc . . . . all of it was a mock up of a fictional group . . . he even had plants in the audience for specifically pointed questions during the Q&A. The artificial frame allowed the video to explore diverse areas and still maintain a kind of unified impact, and, they could even swing slightly towards sentiment and not be mawkish in the least . . .

By far the best art-related event I've seen in a long time.

(BTW: in my possible future postings, I type fast and am dyslexic, so I WILL spell atrosiasoly . . .ok?!)
 

juliand

Well-known member
I'm interested in Raad's work.

Its important to note that not all of it is faked; indeed lots of the material he presents is research-based, or discovered. The lines are blurred between the fictional, the manipulated, the interpreted, and the found. I found myself deeply into it, but feeling a little strange, too: first, because some of the audience seemed not to quite understand that the things they were seeing were not quite, or not all true--they seemed to think he was "speaking up for the lebanese!"--and second, because I felt like I had been folded into a game I'd not totally consented to playing. It's obviously brilliant work, but I've yet to completely think through the implications of my discomfort while it was happening.
 

pfflam

Member
Discomfort is a good term . . . I liked that, I thought he used it well.
I do have some qualms with regards to the aestheticizing of real politics . . . and ordinarily I would climb a high horse there, but I felt that his presentation was disarming and seemed to handle the issue in a transparent way . . anyone looking for real information must have understood early on that this was not a real historical archiving project . . . the swerves and poetics were too clear. They would have found some information that was not faked, and thats 'useful' . . . but what was faked was either unbelievable or simply too poetic to matter in a functionalist historical way . . . . the information that he explored is not just data and dates and measurements but a human element that I think he lends to the otherwise merely historical . . . an historical approach may be of significance in an emotional and immediate sense to many, but not felt as such to everybody . . . his work seemed to offer that possible perception . . . at least I felt it did. It expanded my understanding of that history . . .

But then again, I'm an American (well . ..half) and I'm supposed to not care about history . right?! ;)
 
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