10. Atef Al Jaffal

17 November 2018 / Collaboration, Exhibition

Atef Al Jaffal: Circle

Street behind Shataa Al Jameel

Photos by Christina Werner


CIRCLE is a mural by Atef Al Jaffal, a young designer who painted a circle on the exterior wall of an ordinary one-family house and integrated eight images on plates, designed in contrasting colours, with the circle. Each design mirrors disputed issues within the Iraqi community. The images are ambivalent: a veiled woman stands for the discrepancy of tradition versus modern life, intertwined hands point to topics of gender and love, walls and roadblocks tackle questions of danger and control. Al Jaffal sees the country of Iraq as one big family. He thinks that to be able to live a normal life, the people should start to learn to respect each other and allow for different ways of being part of a community. The artist chose this ordinary family home in order to render a clear connection between the bonds of family life and how we operate in the larger community – to raise the question of how our domestic intimacies, responsibilities, and behaviour can influence our participation in society as a whole.