The City of Baghdad in Art: Innovations as Reinterpretations of Destruction

Abstract

In and amongst the return to ruin ravaging the city of Baghdad, its contemporary artists lamented these violent turns unto space, taking it from utopian bliss to everyday dystopia. Their works represent a conveyance of the spatiality of pain but also a reckoning with character-altering devastation. There is further love of place even as it suffers the perils of war, the challenge being to reconcile death within life through the complexities of representation. Within these artistic offerings is the pioneering of the aestheticization of ruin. It is that life necessarily emerges from the bowels of devastation as the five selected native artists capture the majesty and ache of the capital as it ignited their imaginations. This is, in many ways, a series of interpretative frameworks that treat the afflicted city so that it may survive. It is settled into their imaginative sensibilities that can reclaim what was stripped in the absurdity of the real. From the permeation of ruination as material into the art-making process to reified pain, these Iraqi creatives have incorporated woundedness into their pieces. They speak back to the city what it was feeling and reeling from and uncover a spatiality of loss and innovation.