Let's be honest, the weather helped, 1998/2006
Title: Let's be honest, the weather helped
Attributed date: 1998
Attributed to: Walid Raad
Production date: 2006
The following photographs are attributed to Walid Raad who donated them to The Atlas Group in 1998 In the statement accompanying the donation, Raad noted:
Like many around me in Beirut in the late 1970s, I collected bullets and shrapnel. I would run out to the streets after a night or day of shelling to remove them from walls, cars and trees. I kept detailed notes of where I found every bullet and photographed the sites of my findings, covering the holes with dots that corresponded to the bullet’s diameter and the mesmerizing hues I found on bullets’ tips. It took me ten years to realize that ammunition manufacturers follow distinct colour codes to mark and identify their cartridges and shells. It also took me another ten years to realize that my notebooks in part catalogue seventeen countries and organizations that continue to supply the various militias and armies fighting in Lebanon: Belgium, China, Egypt, Finland, Germany, Greece, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Libya, NATO, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, USA, UK and Venezuela.
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Let's be honest the weather helped. 1998/2006, 3 sets of pigmented inkjet prints, 46.8 x 72.4 cm each
We can make rain but no one came to ask
Title: We can make rain but no one came to ask
Attributed date: 2004
Attributed to: The Atlas Group
Production date: 2006
This videotape imagines a collaboration between Yussef Bitar, the Lebanese state’s chief investigator of all car bombs detonations, and Georges Semerdjian, a respected and fearless photojournalist and videographer who, until his violent death in 1990, tirelessly chronicled the Lebanese wars of the past three decades. The videotape focuses on diagrams, notes, videotapes and photographs produced by Bitar and Semerdjian about a detonation in the Furn Ech Chubak neighborhood of Beirut on 21 January 1986.
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We Can Make Rain But No One Came to Ask, 2006, Video, colour, sound, 17min 45s, image 4:8, Video installation, Ed. 9 + 1 AP, Excerpt