Walid Raad’s Way of Working Is Inspired by the Mirrors in Vampire Movies

As a teenager, Walid Raad would walk around his hometown with a camera, just trying to make some sense of the world. At a glance, the black-and-white pictures he captured then offer cool, detached views. But he quickly discovered there was only so much sense to be made of war-torn Beirut. One day, walking by a bakery, he snapped a cake displayed in the window. It was decorated with birthday wishes for someone named Hassan. Only later, developing the film at home—his dad had converted the bathroom to a darkroom, encouraging his hobby—did Raad register the date: The cake was for Hassan Nasrallah, then a rising militiaman in the Lebanese Civil War. Raad briefly fantasized about poisoning it. “But I was 15,” he told me, laughing. “I was a coward.”

Decades later, with a PhD and a MoMA retrospective under his belt, Raad returned to that image in a series of digitally fabricated birthday cakes addressed to political leaders who feel difficult to celebrate: happy birthday to Ali, Kamal, Tony, Walid; joyeux anniversaire to Yasser, Elias, Nabih, Amine. By then, Nasrallah had become the leader of Hezbollah; in 2024, he was killed in an Israeli airstrike. Raad’s colorful cakes are at once cheerful and cold—his trademark tragicomic blend of fiction and fact. In his cakes, as in so much of his work, grand political events unfold on an intimate, human scale.

Begun, in a sense, when Raad was just 15, the cake project has everything of his signature: He starts with something true—a document—then extrapolates its logic to create something fictional, maybe even a little fantastical. That method has carried him through a nearly 40-year career and counting.

His work is a standout in the main show in this year’s Venice Biennale: His paintings, drawings, and photographs of banal-seeming beds spring to life when you read a wall text claiming that they were slept in by Yasser Arafat, who “is said to have never slept in the same bed two nights in a row.” The PLO leader survived more than 40 assassination attempts, and “he could not afford to throw caution to the wind… so he lived—and slept—on the move.” Raad adds that he has spent 30 years searching for the beds Arafat slept in, drafting paintings of his mattresses and duvets that he just couldn’t seem to complete.

With the beds and cakes alike, the story unfolds quite literally along the images’ edges: The paintings of the beds are incomplete, bordered with tape and brushstrokes. The birthday cakes appear pulled out of manila envelopes along with piles of pictures, as if being entered into evidence at a trial. Raad says he is “creating the documents I wished already existed.”

SINGLING OUT RAAD’S Arafat pictures in the Biennale, the scholar Saidiya Hartman described his “belief in the imaginative and the speculative” as “critical.” Hartman has devoted her life’s work to imagining the lives of oppressed people who left limited traces in the archive—people who were silenced or illiterate, people whose voices were only recorded under conditions of coercion, or people who necessarily lived clandestine lives—like Arafat. She calls her approach “critical fabulation.”

Indeed, Raad is best known for his own method of fabulation, marrying stories and pictures, imaginations and histories. This way of working has everything to do with his primary subject: the Arab world and its politics and conflicts—particularly the Lebanese Civil War (1975—90) that unfolded in Raad’s youth. While floods of images and their competing narratives have all but defined the digital age, this battleground of misinformation has had notable consequences in the region. “During the war,” remembers Khalil Joreige, another Lebanese artist exhibiting in the Venice Biennale this year, “every militia had its own media station, television, newspaper, or radio. There was a real war of images”—a war Joreige says influenced his generation’s “sophisticated relationship to images.”

Accordingly, the Harvard art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty has described Raad’s work as an exemplar of “parafiction,” adding that one of the most powerful things art can do is get viewers to experience a given scenario as having been true—and remind them that other worlds are possible. In her recent book on artistic research, art historian Claire Bishop singled out Raad too, noting that, while so much work in the genre reproduces the experience of information overload—think: documents in vitrines—Raad offers synthesis in the form of narrative, all without collapsing into the trope of authoritative master narratives against which so much research-based art reacts.

In my own book, Fables & Forensics, I describe Raad’s work as a kind of surrealism for the information age, noting how he gives playful form to the ordinary if dizzying glut of misinformation—but adding that he does so without ever falling into the trap of reproducing fake news. Any fact—a bed, or a birthday cake—that could be mistaken for true is of little consequence, and there are always clues as to the constructed nature of his documents; just remember to look at the edges.

Raad is best known for the work he made as a fictional collective called the Atlas Group, work that presses on photography’s fraught relationship with truth. The Group’s video Hostage: The Bachar tapes (#17 and #31), which they attribute to the year 2000, sees Souheil Bachar narrate his experience of being held hostage in Lebanon from 1983 to ’93 alongside five Western men; he was the only Arab. Some scenes simply show Bachar against a white wall, though the video reveals itself as obviously manipulated by way of green-screened footage of Ronald Reagan. There are less obvious clues, too: If you don’t speak Arabic, you might miss how Bachar’s words are at times contradicted by the English translation.

The Group, Raad says, ran from 1989 to 2004. But dates, like all facts, are his medium. You’ll also find magazines and museums that trace the Group’s origin to 1967, the year of Raad’s birth, or to 1948, or 1945. And the Group has attributed archival images to nonexistent institutions—like the Museum of Fine Art New York. Both the Tate and the Museum of Modern Art in New York have acquired editions of his series “My Neck Is Thinner than a Hair: Engines,” but each lists the work with different dates (2000—03 and 1996—2004, respectively). And though Raad says he discontinued the Atlas Group in 2004, a work from the Group appears in the 2026 Venice Biennale catalog, with the date “printed 2023”—leaving it ambiguous as to when it was made, and whether the Group has really disbanded at all.

Still, one date is clear: Over the past two decades—since a 2005 catalyst—Raad’s work has only grown stranger. The Atlas Group primed viewers to read his documents as unstable, but the later work asks them to contend with shrunken objects, resurrected paintings, and vampires lurking in the archive. Something has shifted, and the old language of fact and fiction only scratches the surface.

IN A RESTORED 19th-century barn perched on a peak in the so-called “Irish Alps” in upstate New York, Raad keeps a meticulous archive. About an hour’s drive from Bard College, where he teaches, he and his wife duplicated the barn’s floor plan to build a second structure nearby: their home. The view from their porch is straight out of a Hudson River School painting, and meeting him for the first time feels like a peek behind the curtain: For over 20 years, he has diligently hidden his likeness from all corners of the internet, populating the algorithm with other faces to throw it off his scent. He explained his evasiveness in one word—“phobia”—but it was hard not to see it as just one more way Raad uses photography to make the world feel larger and stranger, rather than to try to “capture” it. In person, he is warm and welcoming, serving homemade tabbouleh and hummus “the right way”—with sumac and olive oil.

In the barn, Raad has assiduously organized ephemeral materials like wall labels from his exhibitions and name cards from dinners he’s attended, all fodder that may or may not become an artwork in the future. A strappy leather portfolio contained his juvenilia, including those pictures he made as a teenager. He went to high school in Boston—“They had a darkroom and they had a basketball team, so it was great,” he said—where he made pictures in the style of Cindy Sherman, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Stephen Shore, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Lucas Samaras. Raad was able to approximate all of their styles, but what he carried from the exercise most clearly was the experience of embodying a persona from behind the camera.

In 1985, Raad started his undergraduate degree at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he majored in medicine before switching to photography. While there, he won his first photography prize, for a work he made under the pseudonym P.X. Chesterfield, inspired by a real US Marine Corps general, P.X. Kelley, whose name he thought sounded cool. Soon after, he enrolled in the University of Rochester’s “Cultural and Visual Studies” PhD program, which sported rising-star faculty: Craig Owens, Kaja Silverman, Douglas Crimp. It “was psychoanalysis, linguistics, and Marxism,” Raad explained. “The holy trinity.” For Raad, persona, theory, and photography were starting to converge.

As a student, Raad visited and photographed Beirut each summer, a practice he continues to this day. Back home, he tried aping observational techniques from Diane Arbus or Eugène Atget that he’d observed in photography magazines his dad gave him. But he found that “even something as simple as using a tripod was impossible… in a city that’s full of snipers.” He wasn’t making war photography, either, never capturing the actions, always the aftermath.

After taking pictures of detonated bombs, however, Raad was often left with the sense that something was missing, so he started getting his hands on the pictures—circling detritus with a red pencil. Kernels of his most famous works are palpable in his teenage years, which seems appropriate for an artist who describes himself as starting out with an interest in “a certain way of thinking about violence and trauma.” Versions of those red circles recur in the Atlas Group’s Let’s Be Honest, the Weather Helped (1998/2006), black-and-white snapshots of Beirut marked with brightly colored dots corresponding to the code system that ammunition manufacturers use to identify cartridges and shells—and thus, indirectly, their makers. In Raad’s hands, the dots read as much confetti as forensic notations.

Under the Atlas Group, Raad was crafting personas like the gambling historian Dr. Fadl Fakhouri and the unlucky police detective Yussef Bitar—“very serious, very professional people,” he explained—the kind likely to leave behind official documents. But eventually, he found the Atlas Group “somewhat limited,” and became interested in showing how “violence has more insidious effects than we know.” Besides, he added, by the early aughts, he felt that “the language of maps and archives had been exhausted.”

RAAD’S THINKING BEGAN to shift after meeting, in the early ’90s, the Lebanese writer and artist Jalal Toufic while working on a video project about the occupation of South Lebanon. He started reading Toufic’s books, which he found difficult to parse at first, but eventually, he found Forthcoming (2000). That book includes the story of a classically trained photographer who can’t stop making blurry pictures of buildings in Beirut. Raad instantly recognized himself.

“I freaked out,” Raad told me. “It was as if he could hear my internal monologue.” He thought about how certain photographic tropes—something as simple as a tripod—had been rendered unavailable to him in wartime Beirut, but soon was thinking more expansively about all that violence had withdrawn from him. His trinity-training in Rochester had taught him that “language, psyche, the economy… that’s the stuff of the world.” Toufic, he said, gave him language for “a different place that I’d never been introduced to.”

Toufic has influenced almost everything Raad has made since that encounter. “I’m embarrassed by how much I talk about that guy,” he told me. “It’s as if I cannot have a thought without passing through him.” Of lasting impact was Toufic’s concept of “withdrawal,” spelled out most explicitly in The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (2009) but also addressed in earlier essays. In it, he describes the sorts of immaterial losses that can arise in the wake of major cultural upheavals—the ways that rituals and forms can become unavailable or lose their potency when the society that gave rise to them is changed irreversibly by disaster.

Tradition, Toufic theorizes, might be clung to steadfastly in the aftermath of disaster, as in the revival of Orthodox Judaism in the wake of the Holocaust; or it might be suppressed entirely, as in versions of modernism that, also in the wake of the world wars, try in vain to imagine a clean slate and abolish antecedents. When a tradition comes back to life in a new context, something is always off: Toufic calls the act a “resurrection,” because the tradition is not alive so much as undead. The artist’s job is to make this withdrawal palpable—to make the absence present, “like the mirror in vampire films”; for Toufic, only those who try and fail to resurrect withdrawn tradition “may become truly absolutely modern.”

This concept of withdrawal informed the pivotal work Raad showed at the Arab world’s first white cube gallery, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, which opened in 2005. He’d declined the invitation several times before eventually acquiescing in 2008, sensing that something seemed off. When he arrived at the gallery, he found that the Atlas Group’s work he shipped had been shrunk to 1/100th of its original size. When I pressed Raad on how this could be possible, he said that “there are conditions under which your own work is no longer available to you, and your only relation to it feels distorted.” For him, this is not “a symptom, and not a metaphor.” It’s also “not quantum,” nor a condition of “one’s psyche, material conditions, or language”—it is, he said, “withdrawal.” Withdrawal is also the very reason he could not complete those Arafat bed paintings.

The affinities between Raad and Toufic are striking enough that more than one person has confessed their suspicion that Toufic is simply another of Raad’s personas—a theory that would require an elaborate ruse if true, with Raad hiring a body double to appear alongside him at public events. But while Raad is undoubtedly skilled at crafting fictions and personas, he is less interested in pranks than in fables—in what happens when something is imagined as having been true rather than in trickery and illusion.

AFTER THE ATLAS GROUP mined the archive and rendered it strange, Raad’s work went beyond scrambling fact and fiction and toward something more like magical realism. Along the way, photography—which is so hard to read without thinking about truth—became less central. Better be watching the clouds again and again (2000/2017) is a series of collages attributed to a fictional Lebanese Army officer named Fadwa Hassoun, who’d trained as a botanist. During the war, Hassoun assigned politicians flowers as code names, and the work that tells her story features black-and-white portraits of Benjamin Netanyahu, Saddam Hussein, Ronald Reagan, and more with their heads crowned by colorful petals, their legs made to look like stems.

More recently, Raad collaborated with graphic designer Pierre Huyghebaert on I thought I’d escape my fate (again) (2025), an installation that gathers statements from people involved in exhibitions and programs canceled over expressions of solidarity with Palestine. Printed, cut out, and taped low along a gallery baseboard, these quotes are hard to read without crouching. What catches the eye instead are the colored strips of tape running across the wall, like placeholders for the artworks that never got to hang in such a space. It’s another example of how disaster can show up in art sideways, of Toufic’s idea that conflict leaves traces that are visible in artworks and cultural traditions only in the form of absence—that a “truly modern” artwork might make this absence visible.

Toufic’s vampire-mirror idea resurfaces too in other works of Raad’s on display in Venice, alongside the Arafat pieces. Copies of stolen Arab and Turkish artworks appear painted on the undersides of wooden pallets. Here, as in several recent works, the vampire Raad holds a mirror up to is modern Arab art itself, which lately has undergone a period of “rediscovery,” to use the art world’s favorite term—or, resurrection. When the Lebanese Civil War ended in 1990, a wall text informs, militias sold off weapons, many of which found their way to the Balkans; the Yugoslav Wars, then, were fought partly with Lebanese arms. The text adds that the painted pallets were recently found in Ljubljana, at the Moderna Galerija—where, conveniently, he just closed a mid-career retrospective.

Next spring, at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, Raad will place a vintage VW Beetle on its back in the gallery like a dying bug—a reference to “flying Volkswagens,” as American soldiers called the artillery shells they fired on Beirut in the 1980s. Surrounding them on the walls will be reproductions of handwritten notes left on bombs by soldiers in various languages, including English, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, and French—like xoxo, or the dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed, or from silicon valley with love. Raad found images on Reddit posted by braggadocious soldiers from around the world, and then exaggerated the size and changed the color of their inscriptions. There isn’t a whole lot of fiction or fantasy in this one: Sometimes, the facts are strange enough.