Walid Raad / The Atlas Collective

Walid Raad is best known for his long-term project, creating the fictional "collective" of artists, the Atlas Collective. Raad is from Lebanon, and most of his works deal – one way or another – with the troubled history of this country.

His work often revolves around the presentation of forms of 'documentary' or 'archival' evidence, but  the accumulation of images and text (often describing or brushing against violent historical events) in fact only leaves us profoundly uncertain as to where the boundary between fact and fiction lies. Raad creates a whole series of made-up (or are they?) characters, who are supposed to have bequeathed material to the Atlas Group's archive, and whose often traumatic biographies are layered over the material they present.

The work thus explores the nature of archives and their production of historical and collective forms of memory.

The image below, for example, claims to be from the notebook of one Doctor Fakhouri, a historian, listing the models of cars used for bombs between 1975 and 1991, and the text in Arabic gives information about the time and place of the explosion, its victims, the area that was damaged, etc.

Notebook volume 38: Already been in a lake of fire 1991.

For more on Raad's work, you could read the following article:
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/69/60594/walid-raad-s-spectral-archive-part-i-historiography-as-process/

Bob and Roberta Smith

Patrick Brill – working under the pseudonym Bob and Roberta Smith – places the production of hand-made signs, with playful slogans on them, at the heart of his practice. The work is full of (self-deprecating) humour, but also sets itself out in a series of political causes. Whatever the particualr message of the signs, their "DIY" ethos militates for an egalitarian ethos of amateur creativity, social engagement, and self-empowerment.

Bob and Roberta Smith, Make Art not War 1997.

Xu Bing

Xu Bing is a Chinese-born artist, currently residing in the United states. His work plays with the nature of Chinese script.

His work (below) Tienshu (A Book from the Sky) is an installation comprised of printed books and hanging scrolls, bound carefully in the traditions of Song and Ming Dynasty publications. The text, however, is made up of some 4,000 characters that though they look like Chinese characters in fact don't mean anything at all. Xu designed the characters, carved them into wooden blocks and used traditional typesetting techniques to produce the text.

The work - perhaps – explores the (perhaps oppressive) weight of culture and writing, the anxiety of meaning, the absurdity of modernity, and our relation to words and meaning-making.

Xu Bing, Tianshu, 1987-91.

Xu went on to produce the "square word" system, which turns English words into what look like Chinese characters – exploring questions of cultural identity and global hybridity.

Xu describes and shows the system here, also raising the differences between 'calligraphy' and 'writing' as signifying forms.

A further article from the New York Times  is available here.