Ruins, Rubble and Renewal

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This ongoing research project Ruins, Rubble, and Renewal: Exploring Iraq’s Mesopotamian Past through Contemporary Art is led by the Iraqi-British artist and academic Hanaa Malallah, working in collaboration with local Iraqi artists at specific ancient sites inside Iraq.

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This long term, interdisciplinary collaborative project seeks to address how it might be possible to have renewed engagement with ancient Mesopotamian heritage sites – specifically at Ur, Uruk, Babylon, Nippur, Nimrud, and the Archaeological Museum in Baghdad – in post-conflict Iraq. The project has the specific decolonising agenda of exploring the critical question of how such artistic interventions, by local artists at these sites, can enable a renewed engagement with this ancient heritage and history through direct engagement with this ancient landscape.  The project explores the capacity for a form of artistic research that attends to its political and social context, and to a new aesthetic where this ancient Mesopotamian heritage, known in the West as “the cradle of civilization” is reclaimed for Iraq’s current traumatic identity, and for its people’s future, putting the ownership of this civilisation into question.

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Our collaborative research engages with this ancient heritage as a reciprocal relationship with the unbroken continuity of its history; where ruins and its attendant rubble enable creative responses where past and present merge into new possibilities – as renewal.

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