Two leading Iraqi artists have been commissioned to create new works for the Çanakkale Biennial in Turkey, which this year focuses on the concept of homeland and the ongoing refugee crisis that has seen millions of people pour through Turkey en route to Europe. The city of Çanakkale is close to the main migrant routes from Syria across the Aegean Sea to Greece.
The painter and ceramicist Salam Atta Sabri has produced a new series of drawings in response to the widespread destruction of palm tree orchards in Iraq—an important part of the country’s natural and cultural heritage. The uprooting of palms began with the Iran-Iraq war, and has got progressively worse due to continued conflict, neglect and construction in Iraq’s cities. “Iraqis have a deep and ancient relationship with the palm tree. It represents our nation, standing tall amid death and destruction,” Atta Sabri says.
Date Palm Killing Fields (2016) follows on from Atta Sabri’s Letters from Baghdad (2005-15), which was first shown at the Venice Biennale last year. The “letters” are 150 personal sketches that the artist produced after returning to Baghdad with his family in 2005, having lived for more than ten years in the US and Jordan. In 2010, Atta Sabri became the director of the National Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad, which lost 75% of its collection due to looting in 2003. He left his post in 2015.
The Sulaymaniyah-based artist Akam Shex Hadi has produced a new series of photographs, Homeland, Exile (2016), which depicts anonymous women, men and children encircled by barbed wire—a symbol of national borders. On the ground, beyond the razor-sharp wire, lie numerous colourful kites, handmade by children in Sulaymaniyah. “Migration has always deprived us of some of our dreams, but it has also created others,” Shex Hadi says. The artist has been exploring Iraq’s internally displaced ethnic minorities since Isil’s attacks in northern Iraq in 2014.
For the fifth edition of the biennial, Shex Hadi and Atta Sabri will exhibit alongside 40 international artists whose work deals with migration, refugees and temporary settlements. They include Bouchra Khalili, whose Mapping Journey Project (2008-11) features interviews with people who crossed the Mediterranean basin, and the French street artist JR, whose enormous photographs have been pasted along the wall separating Israel and Palestine.
The new works have been commissioned by the Baghdad-based Ruya Foundation, which supports Iraqi artists at home and abroad. Organised by Beral Madra, Deniz Erbaş and Seyhan Boztepe, the biennial opens on 24 September (until 6 November).
