My Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair: Engines

“My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair: Engines” is part of a long-term project by The Atlas Group, a loose group of partially fictional figures around the Lebanese artist Walid Raad, that in their lecture-performances, photo and video installations, documents, and artifacts deals with the 245 car bombings during Lebanon’s civil wars between 1975 and 1991. The installation consists of 100 boards with the recto and verso photographs showing the remains of the explosions, particularly the cars’ engines. The documentary nature of the photographs and their presentation as well as the precise information about dates and origins are supposed to invoke their character as testimonial and proof, but at the same time seem well-suited for questioning the authority and authenticity of contemporary historiography, for The Atlas Group strategically introduces non-authentic material time and again to show how history is constructed in the context of cultural and political polarization.