The Atlas Group/Walid Raad (Lebanese, b. 1967)

Questioning the notion of factual documentation and exploring the creation of historical imagery, Already Been in a Lake of Fire - Notebook Volume 38 represents the pivotal work that brought celebrated contemporary artist Walid Raad and the fictional collective of his own creation, The Atlas Group, to prominence. In this major body of work, an archive of documents, the notebook of a fictional historian named Dr Fakhouri documents a log of every car that was used as a car bomb during the Lebanese Civil War that raged from 1975 to 1990. Particularly poignant in today's tumultuous political environment, The Atlas Group/Walid Raad forces the viewer to question what is real and what is not, revealing a clever play on both historical dependency and media manipulation of the truth.