Deeply informed by his experiences during the Lebanese wars and the broader political realities of the Middle East, Raad's work spans photography, video, performance, and text. Across these forms, he engages how events are remembered, recorded, and transmitted-frequently creating imaginary documents and stories.
Raad's documents and stories expose the mechanisms through which histories are constructed. His landmark project The Atlas Group (1989-2004) presents a fictional archive of Lebanon's recent past, composed of imagined documents, photographs, and testimonies. In his ongoing series Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, Raad shifts his focus to the rapid rise of art institutions in the Arab world. Through installations and performances, he examines the ideological and economic frameworks and the counter-intuitive concepts, gestures, and forms that shape cultural production in the region.
Raad's practice resides at the intersection of conceptual art, archival research, and speculative fiction. His work reveals how power and violence influence not only what is remembered, but how memory itself is organised and mediated. Through these investigations, he invites viewers to marvel at how art may produce and unsettle fraught histories.
