Lebanon's capitol, Beirut, has been shattered and rebuilt many times in its 5,000-year history, with its 1975-1991 civil war and the 34-day Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006 doing the latest damage. Its current population of 2 million lives atop the cultural sediment of every major empire the region has produced.

Though Beirut-as-rubble is certainly not a fictional image, this is the only image most Westerners possess. Whether presented through news footage from the Iran-Contra era or action/adventure films like "Spy Game" and "Navy Seals," Beirut is more than a war-torn caricature where calls to prayer echo between burnt-out buildings.

The work of Lebanon-born multimedia artist Walid Raad, a recent artist-in-residence at the Doris Duke Center for Islamic Art, undermines such simplified depictions.

During an Oct. 20 public lecture sponsored by the University of Hawaii at Mänoa Art Department's Intersections Program, Raad presented excerpts from notebooks, photographs and videos by Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, Georges Semerdjian, anonymous Lebanese intelligence officers, and Souheil Bachar — the only Arab detained with Western hostages in the 1980s. All of this work was collected and organized by the Atlas Group (theatlas group.org), a collective dedicated to documenting the contemporary history of Lebanon.

Raad used ambiguity, tension, irony and humor in place of the voice and structure of documentary authority, After a while, the lecture prodded an itchy curiosity. Did folks in Beirut really have a form of gambling that was based on guessing where the engine block of a car bomb would land? Was there really sexual tension between the hostages? Does the Atlas Group exist? Who is this Walid Raad anyway?

This, as it turns out, is precisely Raad's art. Absolutely interdisciplinary, Raad takes the truth of observation that is the core of all art-making and treats our perception of that truth as his medium. The images or words he uses to guide that perception are stepping stones to a deeper investigation of belief. Naturally, only the cover of the art world can sustain such an approach.

Operating simultaneously as historian, investigative journalist, ethnographer and philosopher, Raad does not provide revisions or corrections of history. Rather, he provides "expansions."

Facts: More than 3,000 car bombs exploded in Lebanon between 1975 and 1991, and each was thoroughly documented. Working through/as the fictional Dr. Fakhouri, Raad combed the newspapers, which obsessively recorded the year, make and model of each car bomb, and found actual cars that matched the descriptions. Raad effectively shows us "ghosts" of these cars, and through the Fakhouri character plays the figure of the ghost-hunter documenting and organizing the effort in one among dozens of notebooks. As with all archives, the accumulation of data begins to create its own gravitational field of truth.

Raad also studied the psychology of car bombing from the victim's perspective. While interviewing survivors who lived in neighborhoods that could be struck at any time, he became familiar with the specific mentalities people developed to survive. People memorized both the cars their neighbors drove, and those cars coming from elsewhere in their social network.

Raad calls the resulting systems of paranoia and isolation — unique to each neighborhood — "ghetto logic," and found that people sustained them after the wars were over. These logics unravel any kind of generalized or linear history and are even more fragmented and granular than the "peoples' histories" that celebrate the contributions of the working class and the marginalized to societal development. They introduce what Raad calls "non-sequential" time, and they are not specific to Lebanon. Raad proposes that they emerge in all places that deal with painful histories constantly butting up against an evolving present.

Hawaii has its own "ghetto logics" produced by historical crises. Ours developed on homesteads and plantations, in housing projects and academic departments. Also through real estate owners, missionary families and political dynasties. This is a kaleidoscope of interests, each with its own history, its own grip on the present, and its own image of the past.

Is this collective relationship, with the fact of the Hawaiian Kingdom overthrow and its ongoing repercussions, not profoundly non-sequential? Though we have a clear timeline of events, the sheer inertia of the present makes resolving a huge crime from the recent past seem impossible.

Full deployment of Raad's strategies of historical expansion — a wholly but not exclusively artistic effort — would disrupt the meaning of the timeline and distort the stable reflections of the kaleidoscope. But what if we started smaller? What if every day an explosion reminded us of annexation? Raad's approach, with the addition of an invented ritual, ideology or figure, could reinterpret the sporadic but year-round detonation of M-80s, or the weekly Waikíkí fireworks as exactly that.

Let us hope that during his interactions with staff from the Doris Duke Foundation, The Contemporary Museum, UH-Mänoa's art department, and especially the students, Raad planted a few imagination bombs.

David Goldberg is an independent cultural critic, writer and lecturer at Kapiolani Community College.