The current show, “Walid Raad — We Can Make Rain But No One Came To Ask,” at Brown University’s Bell Gallery comes in two parts — a video installation with text and photographs in the gallery itself, above; and a series of wall-sized illustrations in the lobby outside the gallery, below.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery has a well-deserved reputation as one of the state’s top showcases for cutting-edge visual art. Yet the first thing you notice as you enter “We Can Make Rain But No One Came To Ask,” a new multimedia installation by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad, isn’t a sight but a sound — specifically, the sound of waves breaking on a beach.

Other sounds quickly follow: birds chirping, cars rolling past, shops opening, voices calling. Close your eyes, and you could be in almost any oceanfront city in the world.

As it turns, though, you’re in a very specific city at a very specific time: the Lebanese capital of Beirut on Jan. 21, 1986. On that date, a car filled with explosives was detonated by a person or persons unknown outside a local apartment building. The resulting explosion ripped through the building, sending a deadly hail of metal, concrete and glass flying in all directions. Amid the smoke and rubble, rescue crews worked furiously to find the dead and rescue the wounded.

How do we know all this? Because Raad carefully amassed a trove of newspaper stories and photos relating the explosion and its aftermath. He then incorporated the material into two artworks, both of which are sparely and simply presented by Bell Gallery curator Vesela Sretenovic. One is a grainy 17-minute video that plays continuously (and mostly silently, except for some incidental street sounds) on the gallery’s back wall. The other is a folio of ink-jet prints that include both words and pictures and that provide much of the exhibit’s historical and contextual background.

Given the amount of research, you might expect something along the lines of PBS’s Frontline series. But Raad, who’s currently based in New York City (he teaches at Cooper Union) and who’s known for works that deliberately blur the line between fact and fiction and the personal and the political, isn’t a traditional documentarian. Instead, he’s after something more elusive — a kind of hybrid history that can accommodate both objective and subjective forms of truth.

Browse through the exhibit’s print section, for example, and you’ll learn quite a bit about “the troubles,” as Beirut’s residents refer to the on-again, off-again civil war that has wracked their city for decades. Needless to say, most of the information isn’t pretty — like the grisly statistic that more than 4,380 Lebanese died in car bombings between 1975 and 1991.

The prints also document a conversation between two men: Yusef Bitar, a Beirut-based explosives expert who led many of the car-bomb investigations, and Georges Semerdijian, a Lebanese journalist who risked his life to expose the people behind the bombings.

As it turns out, however, the supposed “conversation” between Bitar and Semerdijian never took place. Instead, Raad used excepts from news stories and interviews to creative an imaginary dialogue between the two men. The video, meanwhile, freely mixes news photographs with other images, including short video clips, computer-generated images and even old postcards.

Even the company credited with producing the video — the Atlas Group — turns out to be fake. It’s the name of an imaginary foundation Raad created in 1999.

The mingling of fact and fiction continues in a second installation located just outside the entrance to the Bell Gallery, in the lobby of Brown’s List Art Center. Titled “I Feel A Great Desire To Meet The Masses Once Again” and attributed to an artist named Elly Boueri, it focuses on another terrorism-related topic: the trials of terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Visually, the installation consists of a series of giant courtroom illustrations showing the trials’ main actors — lawyers, judges and defendants — engaged in what appear to be heated confrontations. Yet like the earlier “conversation” between Bitar and Semedijian, these illustrations aren’t “true” in any literal sense. Instead, they’re probably best described as “inspired by” actual events. Likewise, “Elly Boueri” turns out to be one of several pseudonyms Raad uses in his work.

What are viewers to make of Raad’s hall-of-mirrors approach to historical events?

Many, I suspect, will be frustrated, not only by the liberties he takes with his materials but by the hot-button topics — car bombings, 9/11, Guantanamo — he chooses to address. Pondering the emotional and historical complexities of terrorism, especially in the teasingly postmodern style that Raad seems to prefer, isn’t something that comes naturally to many Americans.

On the other hand, Raad’s message — that there are often many sides to an issue and that even “reliable” sources of information can be misleading — is well worth remembering. People who forget history may be doomed to repeat it. But people who insist on a one-sided version of history — or who allow others to impose it on them — probably won’t fare much better.

“We Can Make Rain But No One Came To Ask” and “I Feel A Great Desire to Meet The Masses Once Again” run through May 25 at the David Winton Bell Gallery, List Art Center, 64 College St., Providence. Hours: Mon.-Fri. 11-4 and Sat.-Sun. 1-4. Contact: (401) 863-2932.

Weird, manic, visionary, even a little scary — the work of William Schaff, a Warren artist who’s exhibiting at the 5 Traverse Gallery through the end of the week, is all these things and more. In fact, Schaff, who’s primary mediums are drawing and printmaking but who also dabbles in painting, collage and needlework, may the closest thing the Rhode Island art scene has to an Old Testament prophet. You can almost hear him shouting “Repeat! Repent! The end is near!”

Stylistically, Schaff’s gaunt-faced figures owe a lot to German Expressionist artists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix. (It’s a comparison Schaff doesn’t seem to mind: one of his drawings, a typically nightmarish study of two men standing on a pier, is titled Lost Luggage in Berlin. As a final touch, Schaff has one of the men ask the other “Papier, Jude — Papers, Jew?”)

Other influences range from the Bible (one work alludes to the story of Jonah and the Whale) to outsider art forms such as tattoos and biker art. Perhaps the show’s most striking entry is a big cut-paper collage showing a pair of menacing-looking German shepherds circling a dying eagle. Given the context, it may be the most light-hearted thing in the show.

Also on display are several paintings by Neal Walsh. Walsh, who moonlights as the gallery manager for AS220, works in a mostly abstract style, with large blocks of color alternating with rougher area that have been scraped and scoured to reveal layers of raw canvas and underpainting.

Ends Saturday at 5 Traverse Gallery, 5 Traverse St., Providence. Hours: Wed.-Sat. 11-7. Contact: (401) 278-4968 or www.5traverse.com.

bvansicl@projo.com