Some came expecting a lecture. Others a performance or an artwork. The Atlas Group's My Neck is Thinner Than a Hair is all of these things. Or just as probably, none of them. Walid Raad, suave, besuited, erudite and compelling, sat at a desk before a huge screen, pecked at his laptop, read, and introduced us to the bewildering circumstances of a number of car bombings in the Lebanese civil wars of the mid-1980s.
Raad bombarded us with electronic maps, diagrams, photographs of major players in the Lebanese car-bomb scene as though they were some fashionable sub-group of an errant pop-culture, and swarms of indigestible graphics and video material.
Whenever the convolutions got too much for him, Raad started again from some new angle, only to arrive once again at some truth so knotty it once again drove him to silence. Raad's command of his material is as absolute and as fissured as the history he recounted. Then again, he and his two collaborators probably made much of it up, presenting us with a curious amalgam of facts, ironies and Borgesian fabulations.
How else can a certain kind of truth be told? After all, he said, the wars in Beirut were "an abstraction ... that makes me sweat". The following 17-minute video showed cars mysteriously disappearing as they passed, and piles of mangled architecture marching across the screen.
A conundrum perhaps, a montage definitely. In a question and answer session, Raad's ready made replies and deflections continued the play. Can you predict the future bombings in the war predicted to commence on January 8 2007? someone asked. Previously performed in Beirut and Brussels, this was a provocation, a fiction, a dismaying response to an impossible situation. And a dig at those that would claim to hold the truth, or reduce history to mere fact.
· Repeated tonight. Box office: 020 7930 3647
