Walid Raad's delayed bomb presence at Galerie Thomas Schulte

Walid Raad, born in Lebanon in 1967 and known for The Atlas Group (1989–2004), currently shows installations at Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin and at the Venice Biennale. In Berlin, a VW Beetle lies upside-down as a stand-in for a 1982 US bomb that fell on his family's home. The bomb, dropped by the USS New Jersey, created a 10-meter-long, 3-meter-deep hole that the family used as a swimming pool. Raad's work explores fiction and reality, drawing from found documents. He teaches at Bard College and has been involved with the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition and Cooper Union activism. He describes his process as receiving and creating, not fiction versus history.