Museums the world over have, for some time now, been wrestling with the problem of diminishing attendance and how to reinvent themselves.
Some have overhauled their programming purview, while others have embraced ever more daring hi-tech platforms for presenting various artistic disciplines.
The Museum for Islamic Art has gone for a relatively straightforward and eminently rational move by opening a new gallery tailored to introduce a fresh dimension to the institution’s wares. As I followed museum general director Gilad Levian up the stairs from his office, we climbed and climbed – a couple of floors higher than I’d ever been in the venerable building.
“This used to be the museum library,” he explained as we reached the uppermost level and he opened the door to a spacious, high-ceiling room with an abundance of natural light. It immediately felt inviting.
The works on display also beckoned me inside as I began to get a sense of what today’s artistic community in Iraq – albeit, largely the senior members thereof – has to offer the world. The exhibition title, in Hebrew, starts out with “MiEres LeHeres,” a nifty piece of rhyming that translates as “From Cradle to Destruction.” It ends with the self-explanatory denouement: “Contemporary Iraqi Art.”
The show found a temporary home at the museum largely thanks to the inspiration and practical endeavor of Oded Halahmy, an 86-year-old Iraqi-born Israeli-American artist who resides in New York.
He runs his Pomegranate Gallery there, in Soho, where he invests considerable energy and, no doubt, wherewithal, in providing artists from his native country with somewhere to exhibit their work – and to introduce the world to another, far more salubrious, side to Iraq, compared to the doom and gloom, and images of violence we see on the news.
“The Iraqis are very proud of their culture,” Levian noted. “Iraq is the cradle of human culture and history. That’s why we chose this title. This is where the most ancient cultures began human history.”
Levian said it has been a long, undulating timeline. “This is not just about ancient eras. We see the ups and downs throughout Iraq’s history. There have always been times of prosperity and destruction, over and over. But the heritage is within the people, regardless of the regime.” That roller coaster trajectory is succinctly portrayed in the artworks.
Halahmy spares no effort in fueling his passion. The opening wall text near the display hall entrance features a poignant Halahmy quote: “It seems that I left Iraq, but Iraq has never left me.”
“He lives his Iraqiness; he lives this culture through the books he writes and the art he creates and also the clothes he wears,” Levian said. Having never met Halahmy in person, although we chatted on the phone some years back, that caught me unawares. “He makes his own clothes, traditional Iraqi-style clothing,” Levian added.
That sensibility and sense of cultural allegiance come through everywhere you look in “MiEres LeHeres.” As the title suggests, many of the works recall the trials, tribulations, and disasters that have befallen Iraq over the centuries and, in particular, the past fifty or so years, most palpably in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s barbaric regime following his ascent to power in the late 1970s.
Unexpected philanthropy
There is a fascinating backstory to the exhibition, involving an art-loving US soldier on a tour of duty in Iraq, who obtains permission from his commanding officer to track down local artists and get some of their work to the States, arrange a sale, and hand over the proceeds to the artists struggling in less than ideal political circumstances. Somehow, Halahmy got wind of the initiative and tossed his philanthropic hat into the enterprise.
“He told them he would exhibit the works at his gallery and that he would acquire any that weren’t sold,” Levian explained. Hence, the museum rollout.
Halahmy also has a number of items in the spread that convey some of the depth of the angst that pervades Iraqi society today, as well as the richness of the country’s millennia-long cultural timeline. As the grandson of an Iraqi oleh, Levian is as keen as the exhibition patron to add some layering to our perception of Iraq’s past and present.
The octogenarian patron-artist doesn’t beat around the bush. He calls two of his exhibits Mercy for Baghdad. They are based on the tricolor Iraqi national flag, the design of which has been tweaked several times since the 1960s. Halahmy’s renditions reference both the pre-Gulf War version with three stars across the central white strip, and the look introduced by Hussein, which has the takbir – Allahu akbar – instead of the stars.
The Halahmy six-parter also includes other flag-like works with gashes and stitches, symbolizing the ruts in the long and winding Iraqi road to date and the attempts to heal some of the rifts and wounds.
“When Iraq suffers damage, it is on a massive scale. But it always recovers,” Levian posited.
The other Iraq
“MiEres LeHeres” is full of surprises for those of us – the vast majority of us – who know little about the country other than the media images we see, and possibly recollections we may have heard from senior citizens who made aliyah from Iraq in the early 1950s and their offspring.
The stories often center on nostalgia-soaked tales of the cafés that lined the banks of the Tigris River that meanders through Baghdad, where folk – exclusively the males of the species – would smoke hookahs, sip aromatic coffee or tea, and play backgammon while chatting about this and that.
There is a vignette with that ambiance in the exhibition, in a painting by Fadhel Abbas. It is a realistic picture of three men who exude an unmissable air of close friendship, mutual respect, and simple enjoyment of spending time together. That, for Levian, encapsulates the essence of the upside of Iraqi society and history.
“This is a lovely work because you can see in it the components of the population of Iraq,” he said.
As we walked around the hall, Levian noted parallels between Israelis and the Iraqis on several occasions. He partly ascribes that to the multi-layered demographics of the two countries. “What I love about us is that we think we are the most special,” he chuckled. “We are special, but not the most.”
That does not pertain uniquely to this region. “Almost every country has different ethnic groups and cultural strata. In Israel, it is very noticeable because we are a country of immigrants that took in large numbers of people in one go. But if you take a closer look, you see that Iraq has plenty of cultures and subcultures,” he said.
Abbas admirably captures that intersectarian interpersonal dynamic. “This is charming. We see their head coverings, which symbolize the different Arabs: the Sunni, the Shi’ite, the Kurd. And they are all attentive. They are listening empathetically. They are sitting in a café, smoking a hookah and chatting. This is a cultural meeting of friends,” he pointed out.
What could be more wholesome than that? Just in case you miss the point of the artistic exercise, the no-nonsense title of the piece, A Meeting of Friends, underscores the restorative message.
The art
The first work I espied was a compelling painting that struck me as more than a little reminiscent of the emotive oeuvre of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.
The woman in the painting, created by Nazifa Rashid in 2000, has dark, penetrating eyes that project a feeling of inner strength, tantalizingly seasoned with alluring tenderness. It is a gaily, colorful piece with a deceptively simplistic look to it.
“There is something very naïve about this,” Levian concurred. I noted that she fixes the observer with her quiet determination, betwixt numerous symbolic elements.
“It is a sort of Mona Lisa,” he observed. “You can see the emblem of the crescent. This, here, may be cuneiform signs or the distant history of Iraq. And there are all these flowers, which may symbolize the renaissance of Iraq and the connection between the people and the land. Colorfulness is part of the Iraqi culture.”
Fittingly, the portrait is called Nostalgia.
Cuneiform, which dates back to the early third millennium BCE, was used by various civilizations across the ancient Middle East. Levian cited the Sumerians, one of several forerunners of contemporary Iraq, among those who communicated with the chisel-formed script.
We get a more realistic, almost photographic, take on more modern Iraq in a compilation of diminutive oil paintings by Amal Alwan gleaned from several projects with evocative names such as Boatmen, Marshes, Coffee by the Tent, and In the Old Days. They really convey a sense of everyday life in the aforesaid situations. One even features a riverside café, with figures sitting on the balcony overlooking the water and the bobbing boats.
Cuneiform has a powerful and palpable reprise in Hanaa Malallah’s Uruk Old Love mixed media triptych from 2006. Uruk, which was the name of an ancient Mesopotamian city, is yet another nod to Iraq’s long and mixed timeline.
Glorious past notwithstanding, 67-year-old, now London-based Malallah proffers the painful present, front and center, in the shape of bullet holes. She also scraped away parts of the surfaces of the three frames to indicate the violence that has wracked her homeland for so long.
Devastation is the leitmotif of the “Laylat an Nar” (Night of Fire) series by Mohammed al-Hamadany. However, the destruction on this occasion was inflicted by the US Army as the Americans bombarded Baghdad during the Second Gulf War in 2003.
The five tall, narrow oil and acrylic paintings, taken from a 25-parter, are a mass of symbols with flaming red a dominant presence, skeletal frightened faces – possibly of victims of the Hussein regime and thereafter – and other symbols, such as a chair.
“That may allude to the seat of power,” Levian suggested.
Halahmy’s contribution takes in statues, including a touching nickel-bronze cast comprising five figures with clear and somewhat naïve shapes, such as a palm tree and a figure topped by a pomegranate crown. The juicy red fruit is something of an obsession for Halahmy. When it comes to Iraq, he clearly wears his heart on his sleeve. This work is called, simply, My Homeland.
Qasim Sabti’s “Book Cover Collage” series references the destruction of libraries in Iraq, at the academy where Sabti taught, and all the way back to Baghdad’s legendary library, which was ransacked by the Mongols in 1258. On a more modern and personal note, the eight-piece collage set, with ripped pages and ravaged book spines, is more than a little reminiscent of the Nazi era.
Things take an aesthetic turn for more gentle and attractive climes with Hassan Massoudy’s delectable calligraphic triptych, which cites an encouraging observation by 11th-century Andalusian poet Ibn Zaydun: “Perhaps despair itself may lead toward hope.”
Positive vibes notwithstanding, there is always a flip side. The eight-piece selection from the “Anfal Memory Series” by Ismail Khayat, on the same wall as the Abbas piece, brings us right back to earth with a resounding crash.
The ink and pigment pictures feature mask shapes with irregular contours. They make for puzzling viewing and elicit a mix of emotions. “They are so colorful,” Levian countered when I noted one that looked particularly sinister.
Polychromic format notwithstanding, there is, indeed, an oxymoronic side to the collection. “Ismail Khayat is a Kurd, and here he tells the story of the Kurds. They are very colorful death masks which are hard to look at, at least for me,” Levian remarked. “They symbolize the evil attack in which 180,000 Kurds were murdered by Saddam Hussein with chemical gas.”
The series title “Al-Anfal” translates as “the spoils” of war and references a chapter of the Koran about the victory of a group of early Muslims over a much larger foe. It is also the name of Hussein’s 1980s campaign against the Kurds.
The placement of the Khayat series at the end of the exhibition clockwise circuit, for Levian, neatly rounds off the Iraqi narrative. “This reflects the cycles in this exhibition, which tells the story from optimism and naiveté through so many wars in which there was hope, with so much identity and memory.”
“MiEres LeHeres” is an eye-opener and a rare opportunity to get some kind of grasp of the current zeitgeist in a country that is still off limits to us. How many of us even consider the possibility that there are artists active in Iraq who also teach groups of enthused youngsters in academies?
That, at the very least, is food for thought and an impressive debut for the museum’s new contemporary art gallery.
‘MiEres LeHeres’ closes May 31.
For more information: www.islamicart.co.il
