(Credit: Akam Shex Hadi)
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Alastair
Sooke 21 May 2015
The
Iraq pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale doesn’t shy away from the current
conflict, with work addressing Islamic State. Alastair Sooke reports.
As
Islamic State (IS) fighters continue to advance towards Baghdad, contemporary
art in the region is probably the last thing on the minds of most Iraqis. And
yet several gifted Iraqi artists are doggedly working in defiance of the bloodshed
that has beset their country since the days of Saddam Hussein. This is what I
discovered recently, when I visited the national pavilion
of Iraq at the 56th Venice Biennale.
Organised
by the Ruya Foundation for Contemporary Culture in Iraq, the exhibition in the
pavilion has been curated by Philippe Van Cauteren, artistic director of the
Museum for Contemporary Art in Ghent. To select the five artists in the show,
Van Cauteren travelled across America, Belgium, Turkey and the UK as well as
Iraq. In Iraq, he tells me, he found an isolated contemporary art scene
characterised by narrow-mindedness and conservatism.
“During
my research, I started to visit artists in Baghdad and I found that most of the
artistic production in Iraq consists of pleasant paintings that deny the
reality of what is going on in the country,” he explains. “These painters are
guided by beauty and nostalgia. But from my perspective, they are absolutely
uninteresting. I cannot understand why if you were an artist living in a
country with the complexity of Iraq you would wish to paint flowers or the
Tigris or Baghdad streets. I was looking for the 10% of artists who had the
courage to engage with the current context.”
As a
result, the artists whom Van Cauteren eventually chose for the exhibition,
which he called Invisible Beauty to draw attention to the fact that they are
off the radar for even informed Westerners, are all capable of work that can be
unforgettably tough and hard-hitting. Take the brutal and haunting watercolours
of the young painter Haider Jabbar, who was born in 1986. Painted from the
artist’s memories of shocking sights that he witnessed, these depict a series
of decapitated young male heads, mostly blindfolded, bloodied and impaled upon
stakes.
Each
one represents a different victim of the conflict that has blighted Iraq in
recent years, and Jabbar intends to paint 2,000 of them. Hanging on the walls
of a beautiful 16th Century palazzo overlooking Venice’s Grand Canal, they
appear stark and incongruous – a gruesome reminder of the urgent need to find a
peaceful resolution to the conflict in the Middle East.
Although
Jabbar was eventually forced to leave his homeland as a result of the conflict,
ending up as a refugee in Turkey where he is based today, he is familiar with
the nature of life for artists in Iraq. “It is not easy to work as a
contemporary artist in Iraq,” he tells me by email. “To stay alive is the
biggest challenge.”
According
to Jabbar, there are only a handful of avant-garde artists in Baghdad, so the
scene, such as it is, is extremely ‘limited’. Baghdad has only three ‘basic’
galleries and there is no funding for contemporary artists, who generally
congregate in each other’s homes or the city’s coffee shops. Another centre for
discussion is Baghdad’s Institute of Fine Arts, but the atmosphere of the
college, which offers a classical education to young painters and sculptors, is
decidedly old-fashioned.
With
no access to art magazines, young artists trawl YouTube and hunt out
information online to stay abreast of developments in contemporary art
elsewhere in the world. But they can still feel out of touch. For a Western
audience, Jabbar’s watercolours, for instance, immediately call to mind the
distinctive style of the fashionable South African-born painter Marlene Dumas.
Yet until he had met Van Cauteren, Jabbar had never heard of her, let alone
seen her work.
Invisible
Beauty also showcases Iraqi photography. In a new series of 28 black-and-white
photographs specially created for the pavilion, Akam Shex Hadi, born in 1985,
presents portraits of displaced ordinary Iraqis standing in a variety of
settings. Each image also includes a length of sinister black fabric snaking
through the composition and encircling the subject of the portrait like a
noose. According to Shex Hadi, this black cord represents the IS flag.
While
the Foundation has faced
criticism for its ties to a controversial Iraqi dynasty, the pavilion
offers a welcome showcase. Exhibiting at the Venice Biennale is important for
Iraqi artists such as Shex Hadi because it means finding an audience for their
work – something that is absent back home. “It’s not easy at all to have a
career as an artist in Iraq,” he tells me, “because the view of Iraqis towards
contemporary art is uninformed. The most difficult challenge is the public
perception: the audience doesn’t understand, so it feels like my work is
negated, as there is little appreciation. In any country suffering a crisis
like Iraq, culture and art suffer the most. Only artists care about art.”
Of
course, this wasn’t always the case: just look at the elegant images by Latif
Al Ani, who was born in 1932 and has a reputation as the ‘founding father
of Iraqi photography’. During the ‘50s and ‘60s, he enjoyed a successful
career as a fine-art photographer: in 1963, a solo exhibition of 105 images by
Al Ani toured America. Many of his photographs document Iraq’s mid-century
transition towards modernity – in one memorable image, for example, a glamorous
woman wearing sunglasses stands smiling beside a highway while a wizened
shepherd passes by leading a huge flock. But Al Ani is also proud of his
country’s ancient heritage, and several of his photographs record
archaeological monuments. These images feel all the more precious today, as IS
militants ransack and demolish archaeological sites across the Middle East.
“The
Sumerians, Babylonians, all the way to the Abbasids – all the monuments and art
they created, that gives me pride,” Al Ani says in the Invisible Beauty
catalogue. “Iraq has a remarkable history. These cultures followed each other,
civilisation after civilisation, and they were all over Iraq, in the north and
the south… Then the retreat began. I wish we could go back to civilisation.”
In
the face of the seemingly relentless advances of Islamic State, this may not
sound like much. Nevertheless, it is heartening to hear that the courageous
Iraqi artists exhibiting in Venice are still prepared to stand up for the
forces of civilisation.
Alastair
Sooke is art critic of The Daily Telegraph
Haider Jabbar s recent series focuses on the beheadings by IS (Credit: Haider Jabber)
Akam Shex Hadi, Untitled, 2014-15 (Credit: Akam Shex Hadi)
Baghdad in the 50s (Credit: Latif al-Ani)
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