Craters-Gallery

I Was Overcome by A Momentary Panic At The Thought that I Might Be Right. A project by The Atlas Group and Walid Raad in collaboration with Yussef Nassar Until his retirement in 1994, Yussef Nassar was the Lebanese army's most senior explosives and ammunitions expert, the leading investigator of all detonations (primarily car bomb bomb explosions) in Beirut between 1977 and 1993. His strictly technical and non-partisan investigations earned him the trust of militias and as a consequence he was one of the few state officials permitted to move freely during the war years between the different parts of the city. Over time, combatants and civilians alike viewed Nassar as a fearless and tireless figure. At the same time he was regarded as a tragic figure because he rarely detected in advance and defused a car bomb. His earnest and exhaustive labor came to be viewed as another casualty of the explosions he investigated as politicians and judges politicized his findings and rarely prosecuted anyone for the car bomb crimes. Throughout his years as an investigator, Nassar produced and preserved a number of texts, photographs, diagrams, sketches, and drawings. These form the basis of the collaboration between Nassar and The Atlas Group. In this exhibition, The Atlas Group and Yussef Nassar present a three-dimensional work inspired by Nassar's diagrams and photographs.