Art and Visual Studies
Thursday, 7 October 2021, 11 am - 12:30 pm EST / 6 pm - 7:30 pm AST
Moderator: Dr. Nada Shabout
Dr. Nada Shabout is a Professor of Art History and the Coordinator of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Initiative (CAMCSI) at the University of North Texas. She is the founding president of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Arab World, Iran and Turkey (AMCA). She is the author of Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics, University of Florida Press, 2007; co-editor of New Vision: Arab Art in the 21st Century, Thames & Hudson, 2009; and co-editor of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018. She is also founding director of Modern Art Iraq Archive. Notable among exhibitions she has curated: Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art, 2010; traveling exhibition, Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art, 2005-2009; and co-curator, Modernism and Iraq, 2009. Major awards of her research include: Getty Foundation 2019; Writers Grant, Andy Warhol Foundation 2018; The Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TARII) fellow 2006, 2007, Fulbright Senior Scholar Program, 2008. She is currently working on a new book project, Demarcating Modernism in Iraqi Art: The Dialectics of the Decorative, 1951-1979, under contract with the American University in Cairo Press. Dr. Shabout is also on the Board of TARII.
From Sumer to Shakriya: The Antediluvian Legacy of Ṣarīfa Architecture in Iraq
Speaker: Dr. Huma Gupta, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
abstract
The sarīfa is a house of prefabricated reed mats laid over a barrel-vault shaped roof supported by a ridge pole and a wooden frame. This architectural form is associated with the roughly 20,000 square miles of marshes in the southern basin of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. Reed architecture has a presence in both the visual archaeological record and the literary cuneiform record. First, a contemporary mudīf (reed guest house) appears on the carved gypsum trough from Uruk dated to 3300 to 3000 BCE. Second, in The Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 1800 BCE), the god of fresh water, crafts, and wisdom Ea would warn Utnapishtim of the coming of the great flood that would exterminate mankind by whispering to his reed home. However, between the 1920s and 1970s, tens of thousands of rural migrants from southern Iraq adapted sarīfa architecture in cities like Baghdad and Basra. Reed homes became a defining feature of the mid-20th century capital. However, anthropological and ethno-archaeological discourses cast the sarīfa as a premodern artifact and portrayed those who inhabited such architecture as “primitive” others, allegedly living in the same manner as their ancient predecessors. This paper thus, examines how experts such as the social anthropologist S.M. Salim, who was the first person authorized by the Iraqi government to conduct long-term anthropological fieldwork in the southern marshes, contributed to a re-imagining of the contemporary 1950s sarīfa as an artifact of antiquity in a moment when sarīfa architecture was targeted for extinction by various Iraqi ministries.
about the speaker
Huma Gupta is a full-time Lecturer in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. Gupta holds a PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture and a Master's in City Planning from MIT. Currently, she is writing her first book The Architecture of Dispossession, which is based on her doctoral thesis on state-building and the architectural transformation of migrant reed-mat and mudbrick settlements in mid-century Iraq. Previously, Gupta was the Neubauer Junior Research Fellow at Brandeis University, Humanities Research Fellow at New York University-Abu Dhabi, and International Dissertation Research Fellow at the Social Science Research Council. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World, and Thresholds.
Theater of Violence: A Reality and Its Double in Hassaballah Plays
Speaker: Dr. Alyaa Naser, University of Baghdad
abstract
Iraqi theatre, as all theatres, is a practice of entertainment and a tool of raising awareness. Since its beginning, (mid-twentieth century), Iraqi theatre was framed with a political orientation. Even during the widespread movement of commercial theatre since the beginnings of the 1980s until this day, the political intention cannot be escaped or overshadowed. These implicit and explicit political intentions have always targeted the authorities, as well as the audience simultaneously. After 2003 war, the civil conflict, and the multiple governments that ruled the country since, theatre witnessed a dramatic growth that is evidently projected through the style and the performances of Iraqi theatre practitioners.
Among these signs of growth, is the violent imagery and practices that are presented on the stage. These practices can be traced back to the late 1980s of the previous century and the mid-1990’s, particularly shown in Kareem Chither’s The Masks 1990, and Ali Al Zaidi Fourth Generation 1997. Since 2003, theatre, like most if not all life activities, struggled to gain its status in a community that suffers to survive, let alone thrive. Hence, theatre did not escape the violent reality that Iraqis lived and are still living. Sameem Hassaballah, a theatre practitioner and academic, who personally suffered a loss as a result of the violent reality, projected such violent images in his theatre, adapting it as a norm that he follows. His two plays, Ice and Fall, the focus of the current study, are among the prominent examples that can be investigated for the sake of more perception and appreciation of the Iraqi contemporary reality and its theatrical representations. Actually, the paper is part of a wider project of an in-depth study of the violent representations in Iraqi theatre that the author is working on in light of Aleks Sierz’s In-Yer-Face Theatre (2001). When the later takes British Drama for its meat, the former tries to compare and contrast the same visions and application of the British “Hot theatre” in an Iraqi context.
As Hassaballah states, the two plays are two thirds of a project of three violent plays that he is still developing. The study falls in three sections. The first deals with Ice (2013), a play with one act and a particular performance requirement, and it implications, suggestions and reception. The second section goes through Fall (2016), the adaptation and its reflections on Iraqi theatre audience. The third section explores how much both plays have borrowed from the Iraqi reality and how much theatrical philosophies, such as those of Artud’s theatre of cruelty, Machon’ Immersive Theater, and Sierz’s In-Yer-Face theatre have consciously and unconsciously rendered to the growth of such performances.
about the speaker
Dr. Alyaa A. Naser received her diploma in English language teaching in 1996. She taught English language in Iraq for ten years. She had a B.A. in English language from Baghdad University in 2003. In 2006, she completed her master’s degree in English Literature/ Modern Poetic Drama from Baghdad University, College of Education for Women. She taught English literature and drama for five years in the same college, as well as working as the coordinator of the department of English there, before starting her PhD studies in the UK in 2012. She has finished her doctoral studies in the School of English/ Sheffield University in the UK in late 2016. Her Ph. D. research focused on Contemporary Drama of and about Iraq (1990-2013). As part of her research, she has translated about twenty Iraqi plays in addition to some prose poetry texts into English. Since her return to Baghdad in January 2017, she has been an instructor of English literature, Drama and Humanities in the University of Baghdad, College of Arts, Department of English. Her scholarly research focuses on contemporary political drama, mainly of and about Iraq, as well as translating plays and articles from and to English and Arabic.
Wet Pressure Points: The Southern al-Ahwar Marshes as Fluid Site, Substance, and Process in Contemporary Iraqi Printmaking
Speaker: Dr. Elizabeth Rauh, American University in Cairo
abstract
Uses of image technologies in twentieth-century Iraq developed in tandem with environmental changes to the country’s al-Ahwar marshes. Early photographic and printing techniques, first imported into the region by its pluralist communities, documented the country’s nascent modernization efforts such as built bridges across the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Photographic surveys centered especially on Iraqi waterways and indigenous wetland technologies, including riverboats, ecoarchitectural reed huts (mudhif), and local inhabitants’ crafts in gestures towards capturing Mesopotamian ways of life in a changing landscape. By the 1950s artists were studying in foreign art academies and training in the latest methods—especially printmaking. The popularity and necessity of print in transnational decolonial movements lent the medium a political edge, as did its reproducibility as multiples in facilitating the accessibility of art. As Iraqi artists explored graphic practices, they likewise turned to the country’s wetlands as both a creative site and substance that bloomed in printmaking’s liquid processes, while simultaneously proliferating new images of the marshlands increasingly threatened by drainage for agricultural developments. Examples include black ink woodcut prints composed of tar and other carbon substances akin to the pitch used to coat and waterproof the bottom of marshland canoes (mashuf). Other wet processes, like etching, simulated the wetlands ecosystem onto the print matrix, transferring images through pressurized liquid movements across surface contact points and resulting in abstractive artworks. Exploring artists’ engagements with the Mesopotamian Marshes before their punitive draining in the 1991 uprisings demonstrates how ecological bioproductivity can extend into critical image making through the formative role the wetlands played in shaping contemporary Iraqi arts.
about the speaker
Elizabeth Rauh (PhD, University of Michigan, 2020) is Assistant Professor of Modern Art and Visual Cultures at the American University in Cairo specializing in artistic practices of Iraq, Iran, and Western Asia. Her scholarship examines artist engagements with Islamic heritage, popular image practices and technologies in Shi`i Islam, and arts of the twentieth-century “Shi`i Left.” She also pursues research in ecological art practices in the history of the Persian Gulf, such as in her forthcoming study: “Experiments in Eden: Midcentury Artist Voyages into the Mesopotamian Marshlands” (forthcoming in a special edited issue of Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World) and recent online mini-lecture “A Hot Wind Blows: Contemporary Ecocritical Art in the Middle East” for Khamseen Islamic Art History Onlineat the University of Michigan.
She is the Social Media Coordinator for the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA), and co-founder and co-organizer of AMCA’s Noqtah: Art Points Instagram Live Conversation Series on Modern and Contemporary Arts of the Middle East.
Her research has been funded by The Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TARII), the Darat al Funun Center for Modern and Contemporary Arab Art in Amman, Jordan, the Max Weber Foundation and Orient-Institute Beirut in Lebanon, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This coming year she is the Faculty Fellow of Global Modern and Contemporary Art History at the Cleveland Institute of Art (2021-2022).
