Purple Diary
[October 18 2010]
Miraculous beginnings by Walid Raad, London
Miraculous beginnings is the new Walid Raad’s show presented at Whitechapel Gallery. Anchored from the work produced by The Atlas Group, a research group which documents the contemporary history of Lebanon, Walid Raad elaborates fiction interlaced with apparent fact. In this last survey by Raad, he proposes new photographic and video works which combine his social and political commitments in a lyrical way. In one of the show’s central works, he uses negatives found during Lebanon’s civil war of the dead bodies of anonymous men and women and reworks these in a series of monochrome blue photographs. Through these, Raad concentrates all the intensity of his works, the potential for a narrative to break away from inertia and the cold objectivity of facts. Miraculous Beginnings runs until January 2 at Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London. Text Pierre-Alexandre Mateos
