We Can Make Rain But No One Came to Ask is a project by Walid Raad, a Lebanese-born artist who lives and works in New York. Focusing on the history of car bombings in the Lebanese wars, the project includes a 17-minutes long video and a series of 43 photographs. The video, presented as a large panoramic projection, is an imaginary collaboration between two historical figures Yussef Bitar, a state investigator of car bomb detonation, and Georges Semerdijian, a fearless photojournalist investigating a specific detonation in Beirut in 1986. Focusing on diagrams, notes, videotapes, and photographs used by this collaborative team, the video unfolds as a fictional narrative, yet in a manner of a documentary project. In addition, the series of 43 inkjet prints — grouped in four separate folios, each with an introductory narrative and photographic plates with text, and placed on tables like archival materials — explores further the treatment of historical events as both factual and imaginary, truthful and made-up. The allusive title, We Can Make Rain But No One Came to Ask, refers to the impossibility of prognosis, less in terms of weather conditions, and more in terms of the future historical, geopolitical, and cultural conditions.

I Feel A Great Desire to Meet the Masses Once Again is another project by Raad, conceived specifically for the List Art Center lobby. Attributed to Elly Boueri, this large four-part mural depicts the post 9/11 sociopolitical landscape. The background of each wall of the lobby is painted in a different shade of blue, referencing the sky over New York on September 11, 2001, and foreshadowing the subsequent changes in the political climate. The rough, sketchy drawings are digitally manipulated courtroom drawings that the artist compiled for a number of years after 9/11, left intentionally unfinished to remain ambiguous in origin and reference.

Raad is best known as a founder of the Atlas Group, an imaginary foundation whose aim is to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon. The Atlas Group projects involve the creation of fictional documentation of the civil war and political conflict in Beirut between1986 and 2004, blurring the line between historical facts and constructed narratives. In the Atlas projects, Raad investigates how historical events of the past are re-written, re-interpreted and disseminated in the present.

Born in Chbanieh, Lebanon, in 1967, Raad grew up in the mostly Christian sector of East Beirut.  After finishing his master and doctoral studies at the University of Rochester, NY, he moved to New York City. He joined the Cooper Union faculty in 2002, teaching film, video, photography, and installation.

Raad’s work was presented in 2002 at Documenta 11, Kassel, and the Whitney Biennial; in 2003 at the Venice Biennale; in 2004 at York University, Toronto, and the Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Ill.; in 2005 at the Reynolds Gallery, London, and FACT, Liverpool; in 2006 at Concordia University, Montreal, the Kitchen, New York, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and in 2007, at Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich. Raad’s work was featured in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art at the International Center of Photography in New York, 2008.