Let's Be Honest, the Weather Helped, 1984-2007
Archival colour inkjet print
Seventeen prints, each: 46 x 72 cm
Kirkland Collection, London

Since 1999, Raad has explored the fraught contemporary history of his native country Lebanon through a fictional archive. The documents freely blend fact and fiction suggesting the highly subjective nature of historical memory. Here, Raad’s photographs of Beirut's bullet-pocked infrastructure are overlaid with brightly coloured dots. The colours correspond to the 'mesmerizing hues' he found on used shell tips and, as he later found out, to the colour codes of the munitions industry. The cheerful circles of colour are absurdly at odds with the carnage they document, a mix of the serious and absurd that is a vital part of Raad's methodology.