The burning of
Baghdad’s art

>> Iraqi-born art historian Nada Shabout
searches for her country’s lost creative works

LOOKING FOR GENERATIONS’ WORTH OF IMAGINATION:
Shabout

by NARCEL X

Art historian Nada Shabout is on a one-woman mission. As she watched the bombing campaign rain on Baghdad in 2003, she knew much was left out of the frame of her television. To paint a perfect picture of an invasion, and her country’s cultural breakdown, is impossible.

News of the Iraqi National Museum looting ran rampant on the Internet. The Saddam statue in Firdos Square was torn down live in front of our eyes by an occupying force, playing with Iraqi emotions from London to Dearborn, Michigan. As the Baghdad skyline was tinged in orange and smothered in black smoke, the Modern Museum of Iraq was severely damaged by what was reported to be a fire, and systematic pillaging of its insides.

Since her last visit to Iraq four years ago, Shabout, an assistant professor at the University of North Texas, has been on an endless search for the missing modern art of Iraq while writing about the importance of these oeuvres in the grand scheme of a nation’s new identity. With this year’s Middle Eastern Studies Association conference taking place in Montreal, she is taking part in several roundtable discussions and presentations on how we can all help in re-colouring the canvas of Iraq’s tainted soul and the rebirth of art history in the Middle East.

Mirror: Can you describe the Modern Museum of Iraq when you saw it?

Nada Shabout: I actually didn’t go in as it was in a restricted area. The only way I got information about the museums was through talking to artists who went in on the second day of the invasion. On the third day, there was a fire, then the museum was completely looted. Unlike the National Museum, it didn’t have guards or anyone there when it happened. Many people insinuated that the bombing had something to do with it, although the museum didn’t look bombed out. But it was out of shape. I can believe that because the American government made a point in the campaign not to target any cultural institution. They didn’t protect them, but they didn’t bomb them. The tragedy is, no one cared to document that. I cannot find one picture of the [Modern Museum] after it was burnt, as opposed to the National Museum, that was immediately in the news. No one really knew or cared about the Modern Art Museum. That’s probably why the looting was so comprehensive.

Modern and missing

M: How does the missing modern art affect the collective consciousness of artists in Iraq and outside?

NS: The land we know as Iraq has been there since the dawn of civilization. We don’t live like Sumerians, Assyrians or Mesopotamians, however we do have many examples in our daily life that continue that history. There is an unconscious continuity that manifested itself in modern art as well. So think of this—in the ’90s during the UN sanctions, when Iraq was cut off from the rest of the world, what did the Iraqi artists do for inspiration? Where did they look for examples of study to formulate theories? They couldn’t get journals from outside and there were no exhibitions that were coming into their country. In reality, what they did was internally re-evaluate their visual seduction. They had the works of the ’50s and ’60s at their disposal, as well as the theories that came with them. That helped them introspectively develop form and develop their own theories outside of the Western idioms of art. When I went to Iraq in 2003 and looked at the work that was being produced, I was amazed! They somehow arrived formally to the same forms that the globalized art world had reached, but they took a very different route—introspective investigation. That makes us call for a need to re-evaluate modernism and post-modernism as a Western phenomenon, but that’s a whole other conversation....

M: Has there been any progress in finding the looted modern art that was lost during the war?

NS: The museum had a collection of 7,000 to 8,000 pieces, everything from paintings and prints to photographs and sculptures. Some of the sculptures were shattered into pieces, so they are gone. Some of the paintings are destroyed. But even in terms of trying to virtually document them, so far, I have about 700 images that I cross-referenced and know for a fact that they were in the museum. The problem is the archives are gone as well, so we don’t know where to proceed from there. There are several obstacles.