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- Volume 15, Issue 1, 2021
Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World - Shifting Terrains: Art, Environment and Urbanism in Iraq, Mar 2021
Shifting Terrains: Art, Environment and Urbanism in Iraq, Mar 2021
- Memoriam
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- Introduction
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- Articles
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A revolutionary monument: Reclaiming the Naṣb al-Ḥurrīyya in Baghdad
More LessThe monument that stands in Tahrir Square in Baghdad, known as Naṣb al-Ḥurrīyya (the Freedom Monument), is a site-specific work. Spatial in its conception from the very start, this monument came to exceed both primary historical event and iconographic representation to become the heart of the identity of the protest movement in the city of Baghdad, and to define its terrain. And it has now come to signify people’s rights across all of Iraq today. Commissioned soon after the 1958 revolution that overthrew the Hashemite Dynastic house, the Hurriyya monument has to do with the Event of revolution in the sense of event as defined in the philosophical writings of Alain Badiou, as a moment which emerges outside of, and changes the conditions and the frame of existence of its appearance. Thus, the Hurriyya monument commemorated historically the 14 July 1958 revolution in Iraq (the 14 Tammuz Revolution), yet it exceeded historical commemoration to signify the Evental character of a people’s revolution and its reclaiming of the city space.
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Battle ground: Environmental determinism and the politics of painting the Iraqi landscape
More LessBeginning 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.
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Prelapsarian landscapes and post-diluvian politics in mid-century Iraqi art
Authors: Huma Gupta and Suheyla TakeshThe 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.
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Floating on oil and antiquities: Iraq Petroleum, Al Amiloon Fil Naft and Iraqi cultural modernism
More LessThe Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) played a paradoxically contentious and constructive role in the development and distribution of Iraqi modern art and visual culture during the twentieth century. During the 1950s and 1960s, the IPC sponsored a wide-ranging public relations platform that not only advanced the company’s agendas but also opened spaces for Iraqi artists, writers and thinkers to articulate their own cultural ideologies. In its publicity campaigns, the IPC often triangulated oil, antiquity and modernity into narratives of sociocultural progress to promote its brand. This article explores how the Baghdad-based editors of the IPC’s Al Amiloon Fil Naft reformulated this vision of Iraq’s ancient and modern history to fit within the locally constituted cultural trends, fashioning Al Amiloon Fil Naft into a cultural journal that circulated a nationalist vision of Iraqi modernism.
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Three monumental murals for Baghdad: Data from Mahmoud Sabri, Shams al-Din Faris, Ahmed al Numan study years in the USSR in context
More LessThe 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.
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Experiments in Eden: Mid-century artist voyages into the Mesopotamian marshlands
More LessFollowing 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.
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Seeing the point for the line: Shakir Hassan Al Saʾid’s contemplative concept of the artwork
More LessThis article details how existential phenomenology, mystical theology and abstraction came together in the practice of Shakir Hassan Al Saʿid in the 1960s in order to produce a grammar of experience that might establish some human relationship to a universe rendered meaningless by scientific developments.
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Painting architectural heritage in modern Baghdad: The art of Lorna Selim
More LessThis 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.
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The art of nature in Iraq’s marshes: Images of the occupation
More LessIn August 2003, Iraqi exile Zaid Kubra returned to Baghdad to restore and conserve the country’s marshes, once drained by Saddam Hussein, as the signature emblem for the new state. Under Kubra’s leadership Iraq’s marshes conservation initiative became the ‘success story of the war’. Photographic images of Iraq’s restored marshes were potent markers of this success, used by more than 75 news articles since 2003 to fuel special interest good news reportage. Through a comparative of occupation imagery with the Iraqi canon of literary and visual arts centring on the marshes, the article analyses how Iraqi exiles cultivated an occupation aesthetics of the marshes that deployed images of wetlands’ nature – its towering reeds and its soaring birds – to advance the occupation.
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Where have all the colours gone?: Land of Darkness in the work of Dia al-Azzawi
More LessThis 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.
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Representation and identity: Reflections on presenting contemporary art in an American museum
By Ruba KatribThis 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.
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- Exhibition Review
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Naming Atrocity: Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011, curated by Peter Eleey and Ruba Katrib
More LessNaming 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
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- Visual Essays
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Coexistent ruins: Exploring Iraq’s Mesopotamian past through contemporary art
More LessThe project will initiate and conduct interdisciplinary, expanded media, collaborative research at four ancient sites in Iraq, Mesopotamia: Ur, Babylon, Nippur and Nimrud as well as, through a series of workshops, talks, exhibitions and online coverage with the specific aim of exploring the critical question of how contemporary collaborative art projects conducted at these key archaeological sites can enable a re-engagement with this ancient heritage and history, facilitating a greater engagement with that past and thereby contribute to the local tourism and knowledge economies at these locations.
A female lead artist at each of the sites will facilitate a socially engaged programme that will utilize creative responses at these repeatedly colonized sites with participation from local residents, visitors to the sites and female art students; the programme aims to generate a renewed interest in the significance of this ancient heritage. The main aim is for this project to enable the small museums at these sites, which have been neglected for many years, to become more responsive to the needs of the local community. It intends to help with issues of post-conflict healing and reconciliation addressing issues of postcolonial conflict and survival.
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The ‘Ark Re-Imagined’
Authors: Rashad Salim and Hannah LewisThe ‘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.
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- Essay
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