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Abstract
My intention in this thesis is to present a unique parallel reading of two Lebanese born contemporary artists’ work. The artists Akram Zaatari and Walid Raad have created works that explore truths surrounding the events of the recent Lebanese war. Long after physical combat ended, the different parties involved continued to cling to mutually exclusive narratives, and so both artists see truth as a continuing casualty of the events of the civil war. While one artist, Zaatari, seems to believe that historical truth can be collected, recovered and represented, the other, Raad, pursues work that seems to suggest the idea of a loss of ability to recover truth.
I seek to understand this damaged condition of ‘truth’ that the two artists’ work circulates around, and analyse it in terms of interrelated debates about time, history and memory, and the archive and the document. Where a shared contract about truth appears to be missing, as is evidently the case with Lebanon, the onus shifts from empirical facts to subjective stories, such as those told by Zaatari and Raad, about the possibilities and viabilities of multiple truths.
The approach taken is one that seeks to periodise the selected artworks. Hence my analyses traverse various interpretive paradigms in order to try to make sense of the works in the context of post civil war Lebanon. In this aspect, my thesis is a work of contemplation and breaks with some academic forms. I discuss how Zaatari’s and Raad’s art works embody different attitudes towards getting at the truths and untruths of this damaged condition, and the different methods they have used to translate this condition into visual art. I show that the damaged condition of ‘truth’ informs their artworks from this period. It is my conclusion that the two men’s art practices demonstrate the indeterminacy with which truths are viewed in post war Lebanon.