Those who have class in the List Art building may have curiously read the poster hanging outside, which credits the large, politically charged mural displayed on the lobby walls to Elly Boueri. Probably few questioned the accuracy of this attribution - if it says that Boueri created the mural, then why think otherwise?
Most likely, few students went home and searched the Internet for Elly Boueri, only to discover that she may not even exist.
According to David Winton Bell Gallery Curator Vesela Sretenovic, Elly Boueri is the alter ego of Walid Raad, whose project "We Can Make It Rain But No One Came To Ask," will be on display in the Bell gallery until May 25. The way people don't question the mural's authorship is precisely the way many people approach history, emphasizing what seems to be the essential conceit in Raad's work.
Although historical revisionism - questioning, reinterpreting and rewriting history - is easy to find, most people still shudder with discomfort at claims that events never actually happened, or at least not in the way in which they have been narrated. In his project, the New York-based Lebanese artist blurs reality and fiction to explore the idea that history - or specifically in his case, war - is a selectively constructed narrative filled with uncertainty and contradiction.
The work exhibited in the main gallery, which includes a 17-minute video accompanied by 43 inkjet photographs and text, centers on a particular car bombing that took place on Jan. 21, 1986, in Beirut. In the second part of Raad's exhibition - the lobby mural titled "I Feel A Great Desire to Meet the Masses Once Again" - he depicts post-Sept. 11 court trials sketched on a sky blue background that changes shade as the political climate is transformed. This is the piece that he attributes to his "double-agent," Elly Boueri, Sretenovic said, adding that if asked, Raad would claim that an artist from Jerusalem named Elly Boueri actually did paint the mural. Similarly, much of Raad's earlier work is presented under an umbrella organization called the Atlas Group, which is essentially just Raad, she said. "All his work is based on this duality."
Entering the Bell Gallery, the lights are dimmed. Instead of hanging on the walls, Raad's photographs are displayed in a narrow strip on white sheets lined up neatly on separate long tables, intending to create the sensation of reading through archival material, Sretenovic said, adding that the five tables function as separate chapters of a book. At the beginning of each table is a piece of introductory text written by Raad. Two of the tables are devoted to telling the ambiguously fictional story of two historical figures, car bomb investigator Yussef Bitar and photojournalist Georges Semerdijian, who are also the subjects of the documentary-style film that is simultaneously screened on the far end of the same room. This installation is unique in that the video and photographs are displayed together in the same room for the first time, Sretenovic said. "The idea of reading was supposed to be juxtaposed to the moving images of the video."
By blending imaginary stories and characters with what has been presented by historians and mainstream media as fact, Raad creates multimedia representations of political figures, cars, streets and buildings that alternate between blurred or clear, continuous or disjointed and isolated or placed in context. While it may seem as if Raad has intentionally created these tensions in his work, his explanations imply that this is how the images exist in his memory.
"I photographed crowded streets only for them to appear deserted in my negatives; open store fronts appeared shut; faces appeared as backs ... buildings as architectural drawings," he said both in the text accompanying his photographs and in the lecture he gave Wednesday in List 120, which he called "a narrative tour" of the exhibition. The fragmented images and crackling sounds presented in his video can perhaps be connected to a question he posed during his lecture: "How do you rebuild time as sequential and space as homogeneous?"
His speech began with numbers - there were several thousand car bombings that took place in Lebanon between 1975 and 1991, and although there are many general accounts of the wars, he said, individual car bombings and other violent crimes are dwarfed. For this reason, the Lebanese wars have become a "hollowed abstraction" that he intends to fill by zooming in on one particular detonation: that of Jan. 21, 1986, which he claims to have chosen "as arbitrarily as anything is ever chosen."
As he spoke, he projected mixed images on a screen, gradually creating collages - including faces, store signs, chemical line structures and maps - to recreate the train of events that stemmed from that particular car bombing. In addition to giving a historical account of the bombing, his story was also very personal. He spoke of the loss of privacy that came with the violence. He described a Lebanon where people were constantly aware of not only what car their neighbor drove but also what car their neighbor's date drove. "We found ourselves always living in the present, unable to see any future beyond the next few hours, the next car bomb," he said.
Throughout both his speech and the exhibit, Raad never explicitly makes clear that certain elements are fictionalized or manipulated - it is unnecessary for him to do so since, as Sretenovic said, his work deals with the concept that memory is not something that can be validated as truth. Although it's almost impossible to pick up on it, "he's playing with you, teasing you ... deceiving you," she said. After Raad concluded his speech and left time for questions, Sretenovic asked him how he met Boueri (his alter ego), to which Raad responded that he came across her work and contacted her to collaborate on the project.
No one asked any further questions about Elly Boueri.
