Nothing more than the pictures’ backgrounds

When I talk about my work, I usually get a strong and early urge to ruin everything I said by throwing in a black, yellow or a white joke. Hence, I find myself in a tough situation having to present for my work in writing.

Even when I am listening to people evaluating my work, I often hide behind modesty, shyness and again humorous remarks to avoid discussing the details of art.
In conclusion, I have a problem with discussing art.

A friend of mine from the artistic community described my videos as very symbolic, which frightened me for two reasons: For the triviality of the assessment which forced me to partially agree with him and proceed to thoroughly explain my choices to the point that I might as well be writing an autobiographic novel. And the second is that since the assessment does not really say anything in particular it will definitely lead to an endless and pointless discussion.

Words are scary. And once we start using words to explain, discuss or justify the visual texts, we are overshadowed by the words contours and old structures.

I am aware of the art critique advice: “The explanation of the artwork is in its inner satisfaction”. It is a professional solution but I can’t think of my satisfaction. I think about my crisis and the crisis of the culture of my society. All the intricacies of my artwork are laid there.

There is no choice then but to think in different directions. Whether these perspectives are similar or different they are practically a depiction of a life, certain dates, political situations, three meaningless wars, semi-definitions, needs, rebellion, an escape, immigration, a destiny of a homeland and the destiny of its people.

And then the different stages of my life: seven years in the trenches of war, curing my illness with art, immigrating to a foreign country while my inner self continued to be my refuge, the feeling of being a fugitive and a reject, and the feeling that my options are continuously shrinking, like every Iraqi; whether he stayed at the bleeding homeland or left it, he will be looking back in anger to his deep uprooting.

A friend asked me about the point behind using a game structure in two out my three videos. I have asked myself that question before, and as usual I ran away from words opting for a satirical answer: “Artwork is some sort of a game”. But I have the feeling that I can write a small book to answer that question. A book entitled: “why do Iraqis feel like they were played with?” or something like “The Iraqi playground”.

People in my country feel like they are the victims of a major conspiracy. Or a “game” managed by both the deposed regime and the Americans. They feel that everything that happened and is still happening, from the wars to the suffering to the free death was the result of the collaboration of the modern world’s greatest democracy with the worst kind of dictatorships.

Personally, I am not a big believer in conspiracy theories. Not for the lack of professional conspirers, but because I just cannot trust the ability of any human project to carry on for half a century without dissolving or changing or morphing into some sort of a comedy or tragedy. So how can I trust a conspiracy theory that went on for longer than that! But I just ask my friends to think with me and try to analyse the implications of the unfathomable and persistent political problems in my country – political problems that have been lingering like heavy boulders on the people’s chests ¬– in the day and age of freedom and human rights. People are not stupid but they need a helping hand to guide them towards more wisdom. And if they look like they are mythological, not to say crazy, it is simply because no one has helped them to abandon the era of mythology and insanity towards the space of freedom, democracy and development.

I am not a promoter of the tall tales of conspiracy theories, but some facts will either make us feel naïve or force us to bang our heads against the closest wall. The other option we may have is that those facts will simply make us accept the conspiracy theories even if they sounded highly improbable. Take this example: The war on Iraq that was intended to remove the weapons of mass destruction was launched by those who once handed the weapons of mass destruction to Iraq! Hypocrisy leads to insanity. And in Iraq’s case hypocrisy was mixed with cruelty, with death, with humour and with smart bombs.

I don’t like stories and novels, nor political theories, but can someone please tell me how can I be apathetic while witnessing a flow of events leading to the misery of millions of people?

There is an Arabic idiom that I dislike: “the flower of my youth”. The flower of my youth was drenched in the mud of war. I have seen many flowers crushed to bleed and die. Maybe the unfortunate flow of events started there. I used to get insanely scared under the heavy bombardment – whether in a shelter or in the bare outdoors where I felt the explosions following in my footsteps and where the air I breathed was burning. My calm vacations were much scarier, though. On the battlefield I knew what to expect, I was living in a state of manly brotherhood in the face of death. While during the breaks I lived in loneliness among my family and others, who were always trying to convince me that everything is alright and that I was actually lucky. In reality, the regime planned for our peaceful moments to feel like a donation. People go to the movies, they eat out, they get married, and they drink, while a cruel war –where tens of thousands of young men die – was taking place at the borders.

The Iranian-Iraqi war was long and stupid and it bled for eight years, until politics required that the hero of that film give up all of his alleged gains and focus on a new war – a new war that would be the key for catastrophes to come for my country. One can’t feel but trapped inside a devilish game, and feel stupid and powerless like a little screw in a big wheel.

In the second war we realised we are simply dots on a map. We didn’t actually fight a war. Things just flew over our heads while we were dinning at home. It was a war of buttons and pictures we watched on TV. A French thinker called it “the war that never happened”. Maybe it is a metaphor because we – the victims of the war – cannot claim it did not happen, even as a figure of speech. It happened to us, three times, and we were split into three groups: the dead, those under siege, and the refugees looking for shelters.

In order to survive the death, the silliness and the depressing negative thoughts I trained myself to make sculptures by carving into wood or gluing things together. I never got an academic art training. I even taught myself how to play the guitar and formed a band with some friends. Honestly I ran away from every stage during which I was sure about what I was doing. I just experimented without faith or long-term ideas. I just worked with my instincts and ambitions in order to obtain a certain kind of joy. Carving fulfilled my desire to keep my fingers, my mind and my vision occupied, just like insane people who keep themselves busy to forget and to offer sympathy to their loneliness. My sculptures are small, meaningless, clumsy and work in the vicinities of tables. I did not consider myself a sculptor, but a maker of things that contain a certain level of wittiness. But when I started painting I thought I am committing the idiocy of joining the painters’ community. In Iraq there was such a community – a painting community with traditions, maturity, an honorary capital and big expectations. This meant that the artistic community had to recognise me and that was confusing, since among artists I was just like a homeless person who found a shelter. And I did not like that.

I’ve always liked things: machines, floor mops, sticks, wooden boxes, coloured beads, folkloric locally-made items, the shape of the books – not their contents but the covers, typography, the drawings in newspapers, documents and quickly-written notes with crossed out words. Later, the computer gave me a compensation for all the trouble I had in the painting community and the traditions of the Iraqi painting. The flexibility of using the computer and the ability to come up with solutions through experimentation made me reach a strange idea. The computer and I can form some sort of a constantly-occupied small community.

My paintings were always close to being a document or an announcement (advertisement) without actually carrying a point of view. Maybe that is how I compensated for my loneliness, since through the arbitrary use of words and symbols (and in my case, I used the symbols and logos appearing on shipping covers), I felt that a part of the world is actually with me, a part of neglected and abandoned things I share the misery with.

In April 2003, the Bush administration executed a highly technical war while ignoring all political and moral considerations. In the wake of that war, my homeland was left alone to face the pre-state reactionary powers – the powers of tribalism, sectarianism, and regionalism in addition to facing the alleged “mistakes” the American administration has committed during “the liberation of Iraqis from dictatorship” (How can’t you find this funny. I personally prefer laughter to weeping when it comes to hypocrisy). My homeland became a country without a state, without an army, and my homeland was left for thieves, gangs, sectarian militias, and al-Qaeda with an interesting claim that it is building democracy. Once again I found myself a helpless fugitive, making the decision to flee and distant myself from a homeland that was wickedly destroyed. I was close to some mind-boggling events. What was being said was not a case of people circulating rumours, exchanging popular opinions or letting their loose imagination create stories. People were not talking about a fictional conspiracy; they were actually narrating the events taking place in front of their scared eyes. The result was more than two million refugees who fled to neighbouring countries and a similar number that was deposed from their homes and moved to different areas. What was I talking about again? About art? Ohh…the fugitive is captivated by his escape, by his departure, by his sadness, by his memories, to the point that he would forget what he is really talking about …Does he talk about his body, his homeland, his art, or his mother who advised him not to return home and not to surrender to the memories and yearnings, and who advised him not to do anything that could jeopardise his calm and slow death in estrangement land.

My videos? Oh yeah…they played with my homeland and with my life so I tried to play a round with kings, queens, rooks, pawns, bishops and knights who lined up for a battle. I didn’t play with the black or the white pieces, neither the pawns nor the bishops moved, and even the board squares do not appear until the end of the video as a result of a fire that devoured all the pieces. What I saw in the chess pieces was the way they lined up and that’s what I maintained – while switching their places. It is not a chess game but a game of war and destruction and fire. All this was taking place in my country, for no reason.

An American journalist asked my friend art critic Suhail Sami Nader in the early days of the occupation: “Why do you fear the Americans?” Sami answered: “Because we have seen them do “shocking” stuff so far, and we are worried that they will lead us and lead themselves to a conclusion similar to Melville’s Moby-Dick: The ship and everyone on board sink, the whale is killed, and captain Ahab is dead after a grudge-fuelled chase.”

My second film is about the civil war, which I found to be visually equivalent to the mechanics of rotational motion and the random frictions generated by the rotation itself. There was a little game we played as kids where a spinning top hits another one trying to kill its motion. This collision will cause one of them to stop, but the first (victorious) one will only have make a few more spins for a couple of seconds before it stumbles like a drunk and falls motionless. With this metaphor I expressed what happened in my country. The politicians, the externally-controlled groups, the militias, the occupation authorities created an enormous flow of hatred and unbelievable crimes between the various sects that coexisted peacefully for ages, and isolated them from each other. They were left spinning aimlessly around themselves and fighting. The worst part about this war in my homeland is that it used religion as an excuse for the most vicious acts of killing, corpse mutilations and torture. This was expressed in the sound track of the film, which is a popular Iraqi religious chant played backwards, resulting in a meaningless gibberish that governs the rotation of the spinning tops and fills the gaps between their successive collapse. At the end of the film I played the real words of the chant as an obituary closing moment.

My third film was done under the influence of the sad feeling that I will not return to my homeland. Hence, I engaged in compensational emotions expressed with my face buried in dried out and cracked mud, that later flourishes and blossoms. I called the film “Black Earth” (The land of blackness) which is one of the historic names of Iraq that refers to its fertile and muddy soil. While I was waiting for the seeds I planted to grow I was not thinking about fertility and growth, but instead I was thinking about the enormous historical burial sights covered by the soil of Mesopotamia. And in this context I found myself on the edges of the converging and diverging indicators of natural fertility and cultural fertility. And I have no doubt now that I wanted to do something symbolic: to dig a place there, then draw a farewell sign.