Arts Seminar in Baghdad, 2019

20 - 22 July 2019 / Collaboration, Workshop

Memories revisited; postcard from Baghdad

Arts Seminar in Baghdad – Workshop Series

Cultures of Memory

Arts Seminar in Baghdad is a workshop series that prepares the participants to engage with their art works and interventions in the urban space of Baghdad. The seminar starts with a kick-off session – an intense 3-day workshop at TARKIB Baghdad Contemporary Arts Institute –, followed by regular skype sessions and will result in an exhibition, that is also a guided tour of the city, titled Baghdad Walk.

The seminar examines questions on memory cultures. It explores how memory understood as both a psychological and a social–cultural process can find its forms in the immaterial and material realm. Memory is deeply entwined with social relationships, with stories orally transmitted, as well as passed on in film, social media or literature, it leaves traces in form of buildings and monuments, ritual practices or commemorations, material artifacts or other cultural devices.

The exhibition Baghdad Walk will present site-specific interventions that address the paradigmatic shifts that the city of Baghdad has witnessed; historical, ideological, sociopolitical, and symbolic turns of events seen through the lense of the personal. The artists zoom in and out, finding microscopic details or distant perspectives, always looking for locations that are part of the collective memory or part of a personal trajectory within the larger frame of society’s past. The question is not whether to be part of the city’s history but how and on what terms. And what should change and what shouldn’t?

Baghdad Walk takes the Iraqi capital as a case study, addressing the memories embedded in the texture of urban life, from personal events and stories, to architectural heritage and public monuments, the urban web is saturated with memories to be re-visited and revealed.

Participants: Zainab Abbas | Ban Ahmed | Tabark Al Atrakchi | Hiba A. AL Azzawi | Maryam Mary | Aisha Saad | Amna Rafaa | Raneen Sami | Loay Al Hadhary | Nawful Hussein | Atef Al Jaffal | Faruq Al Jamal | Ahmed Al Majid | Husam Mohammed | Muhaned Mohammed | Sajjad Mohammed | Ameen Mokdad | Hussain Muttar | Mohammed Ridha | Zaid Saad | Muhaned Taha | Hadjer Qussay | Fatima Raad


This event is part of a workshop series Arts Seminar in Baghdad, conceived and organised by the Goethe-Institut Irak, in collaboration with the Institut für Raumexperimente (Institut for Spatial Experiments), Berlin and hosted by TARKIB Baghdad Contemporary Arts Institute in BAIT TARKIB. The series is choreographed by Christina Werner and realized with support by Hella Mewis.

Kick-Off Workshop – Day 1

20 July 2019

Kick-Off Workshop – Day 2

21 July 2019 / Collaboration, Workshop

Kick-Off Workshop – Day 3

22 July 2019 / Collaboration, Workshop