Bagdad mon amour : Documents d'exposition / Editor: Morad Montazami

This catalogue examines the strategies deployed by Iraqi contemporary artists to reinvent their heritage, after decades of wars. Focusing on archives, historical collections, and databases, these artists celebrate a visual culture that resists erasure. The publication includes a critical apparatus and detailed presentations of the artists. The “exhibition documents” of Baghdad mon amour study modern and contemporary Iraqi art, after the looting of museums and archaeological sites that occurred in 2003, with the Second Gulf War. A post-traumatic investigation that tries to rethink the archives and historical collections through the museum without walls specific to the artists – but also to the databases of Interpol or archaeologists. By seizing tools such as the inventory, the study of monuments and documents, these artists come out with works that are worried, but ready to dance on the ruins: works that carry within them both the ghost museum of Iraq that his museum reinvented. How did Baghdad and Iraq go from the cradle of humanity, through the Mesopotamian heritage, to a tomb of history? How do local artists and artists from the Iraqi diaspora – but also artists from all walks of life – embark on the paths of a territory that is if not erased, at least riddled with missing spaces? How does the existentialism of Baghdad or its lost museums combine with the past, the present and the future? Bagdad mon amour explores these questions through documentary photography, installation, film and other devices. The texts brought together offer a critical but not desperate look at the aesthetics of disaster. As in Hiroshima mon amour by Alain Resnais, the spark of a dream encounter transcends the worst disasters. Latif al-Ani, Bariza Khairi, Kufa Gallery, Morad Montazami, Iraq Museum, Joanne Farchakh-Bajjaly; Ahmed Naji; Jewad Selim; Dia Al Azzawi; Michael Rakowitz; Julien Audebert; Ali Assaf; Resmi al Kafaji; Salam Atta Sabri; Himat; Waddah Faris; Shakir Hassan

English; French