In 1895 the Lumière Brothers exhibited some of the first films ever made. One of these short, black-and-white films depicted workers demolishing the remaining wall of a small structure. Armed with pickaxes and sledgehammers, they eventually knocked down the wall and were engulfed in a cloud of dust. Then, slowly, the workers moved backwards; the dust cloud was magically reabsorbed and the wall stood back up, to the audience’s astonishment. This extraordinary film by the Lumières is echoed in Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut)_Solidere 1994-1997, a panoramic video installation by Walid Raad in his current exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery. The three-channel color video is tellingly composed as a Rorschach test, with mirroring images above and below a central horizontal.
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A suite of intimately scaled color images in the next room, Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut): 1984, is a visual map of Beirut storefronts, dated from 1984, six years before the civil war ended. The works are introduced by the following text:
In 1984, as a budding photographer, I was thrilled to be hired by a cousin active in the local militia, to photograph various storefronts. It was my first “professional” job. I proceeded to make pictures not unlike those of Eugene Atget and Walker Evans, my favorite photographers at the time. Years later, I found out that the store owners had refused to pay the “security fees” imposed on them by my cousin’s militia, leading to the owners being beaten or exiled, and their businesses being confiscated.
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