Was the Lebanese secret service’s code name for Angela Merkel really “purple horn poppy”? And for Gerhard Schröder “pigeon weed”? Are there waterfalls in Lebanon that were named by the civil war factions of the 1970s and 1980s after the heads of state of those countries from which the militias drew their changing support? And was there actually a depot in the car-manufacturing city of Stuttgart until 2012, which kept the engines that were left over from the car bombings in Beirut? Well: It’s not completely impossible – at least if you believe the artist Walid Raad. Which can be tricky.
Raad is namely a fictional historian. He tells the story of violence and disasters in the Middle East with facts he made up. However, never completely, but just so far that the doubts about their credibility must remain undecided without additional information.
The Lebanese has been constructing such historical gray areas ever since he appeared at documenta 11 in 2002 – back then with his imaginary foundation “The Atlas Group”, whose aim was to promote the supposedly objective historical science and its narratives about the war in which Walid Raad grew up is to question. In his large exhibition in the Kunsthalle Mainz, he explains it in the audio guide he recorded as follows: “Fiction is not the opposite of history. It is the place to express special experiences.” And for Raad, that includes the overwhelming feeling of the absurdity of violence and its goals.
Even the animals in Walid Raad’s “Documentation” show a patriotic sense of art
In his new body of work entitled “I long to meet the masses” (I long to meet the masses), he is therefore concerned with monuments whose frozen poses of rulership at some point seemed like the end goal of warlike politics. Walid Raad’s story of this male self-portrayal goes like this: Beirut’s monuments were allegedly dismantled at the beginning of the civil war in 1975 and hidden in unlabeled boxes – unfortunately without a dismantling plan. In a factual-sounding story, Raad then describes how the puzzle of the reconstruction failed and how a Lebanese curator in Germany finally created collages of new monuments from the boxes. They are now on display in Mainz.
With similarly vivid novellas, Walid Raad also approaches the First World War and the Arab war of liberation against the Ottoman Empire. The motifs of the famous Iznik pottery, which stand for the heyday of the Turk Empire in the 17th century, mysteriously disappeared with the fall of the “exalted state” in 1922. Next. They later reappear as magical echoes in Western culture: on the walls of the Louvre, on the back of the last Rubens painting in Cologne, and even on North American tree leaves kept in a museum depot in Sudan – here eaten out by art-loving insects.
“Fiction is not the opposite of history”: A sculpture from Walid Raad’s work complex “I long to meet the masses once again”.
(Photo: Norbert Miguletz/Kunsthalle Mainz)
Other animals in Walid Raad’s “Documentation” also show a strangely patriotic sense of art. An unknown expensive collection of baroque vessels in Saudi Arabia is attractive to flies, worms and spiders. Each genus is magically attracted to only one jar at a time, and only while it is in the Wahhabi Empire.
But Raad does not only present such ideas to museums. He also thinks them up – and brings in his poetic ideas of global communication. Together with the well-known Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury, Raad entered the competition for a national art museum in Beirut in 2016, with a design consisting of two components: a very deep hole for a temporary exhibition space that follows the insight that time has not yet ripe for a museum canon of Lebanese art; and an imaginary tunnel system that connects imaginary places around the world, such as a “Residence for the Right to Return”, an “Auction House of Dreams” and the “Biennale for Varied Perspectives”.
True or made up? Hardly possible to answer without research for visitors
Of course, Raad and Khoury could not win a building contract with this suggestion. But after the project had to be stopped at a deep excavation pit due to Lebanon’s disastrous corruption and state crises, Raad thinks there is a realistic chance of being able to realize the idea of his art museum in the hole – as an institution that asks rather inspiring questions , to formulate criteria for national works of art. True or made up? Hardly possible to answer without further research for visitors.
Walid Raad’s strategy in contrast to schematic historiography seeks precisely this uncertainty. The sovereignty of interpretation, which above all autocratic systems claim over the past in order to justify further authoritarian actions, including violence, is the target of his subtle mockery. In Putin’s Ukraine campaign, the world is witnessing where one-sided interpretations can lead. Of course, Walid Raad’s fictional history has to capitulate in the face of such brutality. But his humorous invitation to understand history more in terms of bonds than hostilities, looking more at absurdity than opposites in confrontations, preserves the dream of more peaceful dealings.
We Lived So Well Together, Kunsthalle Mainz, until May 15.