Representation and identity: Reflections on presenting contemporary art in an American museum

This text is a curatorial reflection upon the process of organizing the exhibition Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011, which took place at MoMA PS1 in 2019. The text questions the possibilities and limits of decolonial curating in an American museum and analyses the reception of Iraqi contemporary art in a Western context.

The ‘Ark Re-Imagined’

The ‘Ark Re-Imagined’ is an art project that envisions a Mesopotamian ark based on Iraq’s ancient boat types and vernacular architectural forms. Through exploring and documenting what remains of traditional boatbuilding techniques and related crafts in today’s Iraq, the project breaks new ground in the study of Mesopotamian maritime heritage. Engaging at the intersection between art, cultural heritage, ecology and development, the project’s ‘expeditionary art’ approach seeks tangible means to reconnect with the land and rivers through a palette of making techniques and aesthetic forms that have persisted in the region for many millennia. It holds global relevance through its imaginal engagement with the present situation of systemic crisis and potential transformation, drawing parallels between the current climate emergency and that of the Great Flood, and asking what kinds of knowledge, resources and practices an ark for our times needs to preserve.

Experiments in Eden: Mid-century artist voyages into the Mesopotamian marshlands

Following the 1958 Revolution, many Iraqi artists were sent abroad to study in foreign art academies and train in the latest methods – especially printmaking. The popularity and necessity of print in transnational decolonial movements lent printing practices a popular edge while enhancing the artwork’s seeming accessibility and reproducibility. As artists navigated the regional contours of transnational modernism while exploring graphic artmaking methods in the 1960s, several turned to the country’s southern wetland landscapes as new sites and creative worlds. This contribution examines a few of these mid-century experiments with the Mesopotamian marshlands in order to explore how these works bloomed in the liquid nature of printmaking while simultaneously proliferating images of the southern marshlands increasingly under threat in rapidly modernizing twentieth-century Iraq.

Prelapsarian landscapes and post-diluvian politics in mid-century Iraqi art

The 1950s was a decade marked by radical artistic, environmental and political transformations in Iraq. The decade began with an elite-driven programme of national development and ended in a popular anti-monarchic revolution on 14 July 1958. Between these competing visions of development and revolution, members of the Baghdad modern art scene negotiated between a drive towards institutionalization and state patronage with more radical critiques of the status quo. In 1950, for instance, the artist Faiq Hassan founded The Pioneers (Ar-Ruwwād) collective. It grew out of La Société Primitive, which Hassan originally established under the guiding principle that art should be taken outside the studio and into the streets. Their objective was to paint ‘directly from the surrounding environment’ (Floyd n.d.). But what exactly did Iraqi artists consider to be the environment? This article addresses this question by examining the divergent modes of representation adapted by mid-century Iraqi artists to reflect their environmental imaginations. These imaginations ranged from romantic depictions of prelapsarian landscapes to devastating floods, migration and dispossession faced by the majority of the country’s poorer inhabitants who disproportionately bore the consequences of environmental catastrophes and interventions alike.

Painting architectural heritage in modern Baghdad: The art of Lorna Selim

This article explores the work of the artist Lorna Selim in the context of a period of modernization and urbanization in Baghdad, the city she moved to in 1950 with her husband, fellow artist Jewad Selim. Following the neglect and destruction of thousands of traditional houses in Baghdad, the landscape of the city was changing rapidly over time. Modernist architects and planners fuelled these changes, with little consideration for issues of conservation. I aim to show the impact of a variety of policies, historical events and new architectural trends on the Iraqi environment, and show how Lorna captured a snapshot of Iraqi cultural and architectural history which has since been lost.

Naming Atrocity: Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011, curated by Peter Eleey and Ruba Katrib

Naming atrocity: Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011, curated by Peter Eleey and Ruba Katrib MoMA PS1, New York, 3 November 2019–1 March 2020

Three monumental murals for Baghdad: Data from Mahmoud Sabri, Shams al-Din Faris, Ahmed al Numan study years in the USSR in context

The first Iraqi undergraduate and postgraduate students to study monumental art came to Moscow in the early 1960s. Mahmoud Sabri (1927–2012) joined the Vasily Surikov Moscow State Academic Art Institute in 1960, Shams al-Din Faris (1937–83) and Ahmed al Numan (1939–2013) joined the Moscow State Stroganov Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts in 1961. In this article, I will address the subject of the graduation mural projects created by these three Iraqi artists within the ideological framework of socialist realism in art and art education in the USSR, and influenced also by their own historical and political environments. My aim is to answer various questions surrounding the historical framework of the murals, such as by whom, when, where and how they were created, why they became a manifestation of the students’ political and social experiences and hopes and why these grand projects were, unfortunately, never realized. Explaining the history of the artworks and artistic practice, I will argue that, as products of the final outcome of knowledge transfer at that time, these artworks are effectively documents of their era, responding to and reflecting their socio-historical contexts both in Iraq and in the USSR.

Where have all the colours gone?: Land of Darkness in the work of Dia al-Azzawi

This article is an overview of the evolution of the ongoing series Land of Darkness by Dia al-Azzawi (born in Baghdad in 1939), which is marked by a lack of colour unusual to Azzawi’s work. This article argues that, although he initially chose the term ‘darkness’ as an ironic reinterpretation of a historic name for Iraq for the title of a single artwork about a specific tragedy, Azzawi was compelled to return to it time and again as he witnessed the ongoing deterioration of his homeland from afar. It also examines how and why, for nearly three decades after the Gulf War of 1991, Azzawi has constantly turned his focus towards Iraq, criticizing its enemies and defending its future, and continuing to make works about the plight of the Land of Darkness.

Battle ground: Environmental determinism and the politics of painting the Iraqi landscape

Beginning in the late 1940s, Iraqi artists began writing critiques of the Euro-American art movement impressionism, claiming that the way the movement framed the environment was not suited to the Iraqi landscape. Embedded in this argument was the notion that Iraqis could not paint European-style landscapes because of the fact that their environment was different from that of Europe. At the same time, paintings of the Iraqi landscape by European artists in the early twentieth century reinforced the idea that the Iraqi landscape was other than the European one because of its bright sun and empty desert, concepts familiar from nineteenth-century Orientalist discourse. This article will trace the way European painters’ representations of Iraq as other ultimately contributed to Iraqi painters seeking out a distinctive form of European landscape painting in the 1940s.