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Essay 

Themes of Fatherland #4: Nature

In ‘Fatherland,’ the Iraq Pavilion exhibition at the Venice Biennale, the artist Serwan Baran explores the nature of war, patriarchy and militarism, based on his own experiences as a soldier in the Iraqi army in the1990s. Yet decades of ongoing war, Baran says, has also impacted Iraq’s nature and ecology. “Baghdad was once a green…
 

Themes of Fatherland #3: The War Artist

The Iraq Pavilion artist Serwan Baran fought as a soldier during the Iran-Iraq war, and served as a war artist in the first Gulf War. But he dismisses his art work from that period as state-sanctioned propaganda. “We painted in a realistic style but the paintings had nothing to do with the reality that we…
Event 

Ruya Shop: Akam Shex Hadi’s ‘Travels in Assyria’

The Ruya Shop presents new video work by the photographer and filmmaker Akam Shex Hadi. Travels in Assyria (2018) traces the aftermath of the recent war in Mosul, while drawing on Iraq’s ancient and colonial history. The film brings together two different scenes of a school play at the Assyrian rooms of the the Louvre…
Event 

Ruya Shop: Oliver Beer’s ‘REanimation’

For ‘Reanimation’ British artist Oliver Beer (b. 1985) presents two video works, both based on well known scenes from Disney films and produced by Beer in collaboration with school children in France and Britain. Reanimation [Alice Falling] (2016) reconstructs a scene from Alice in Wonderland (1951) in which Alice falls into a rabbit hole and…