Young Iraqi curator's debut exhibition in Abu Dhabi places history in a new light

Mona Al-Jadir's show at 421 has emerged as one of the standouts of the spring art season

Dima Srouji places replicas of Roman glassware on a soft art-handling pillow. Photo: Ismail Noor, Seeing Things. Courtesy of 421

What if museum objects communicated with the past, rather than being simply being preserved for the future? What if an archive presented a multiplicity of narratives, rather than laying out a singular story?

In her first ever show, the result of a one-year curatorial development programme at 421 in Abu Dhabi, young Iraqi curator, Mona Al-Jadir, rethinks how institutional memory can be displayed. Titled The Mirrors are Many, the intriguingly exquisite show, running until May 8, transforms the museum into a spectral site of haunting and personal commemoration.

“Each work in this exhibition is a translation or meditation on the issue of history,” says Al-Jadir. “The premise behind the exhibition is being a witness to history, and then thinking about the history of art history: provenance, the chain of custody, and repositories of memory, such as the archive, the memorial and the museum.”

Throughout, artworks attest to historical catastrophes, not through label texts or chronologies, but through their own sheer fragility and visual evocation of a ghostly presence.

In the work But She Still Wears Kohl and Smells like Roses (2022) by Dima Srouji, eight glass vessels lie like fragile patients on a pillow. They are reproductions of the glass vessels produced in what is now Palestine during the Roman Empire.

Srouji exhibits them, however, not in the standard vitrine, but on an art-handling trolley, bringing to light the hidden processes of a museum — and showing the vulnerability of these ancient objects.

Vikram Divecha’s diptych Shadow over granite floor, Ancestor Figure (1979.206.1561), Gallery 354, Metropolitan Museum of Art (2018) comprises two photogravures, each placed on the floor. They are prints of the shadow cast by a wooden ancestral figure from the Melanesian Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and are nearly identical, but for a difference in shading.

One is a ghost print — so called because it was made by using the leftover ink on the engraved copper plate that was used to make the first. For Divecha, the ghostliness of the second print refers to the elusive nature of this spirit object that is said to now be imprisoned in the museum.

Evoking a similar eeriness, grainy analogue prints by Sara Smarrazo are placed throughout the exhibition. Like Divecha’s diptych, they underline the notion of a history of histories — the re-use of ancient or outdated techniques to not only represent the past, but to think of the means we employ to do so.

Al-Jadir’s lodestar in this project, she says, is Angelus Novus, a print by Paul Klee. The artwork is famous for two things — first, for being the inspiration for the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s theory of history, and secondly, for its own winding and wandering story.

Fearing Nazi persecution, Benjamin left it with the French philosopher Georges Bataille when he fled Paris in 1940. Bataille then passed it on to the equally noted philosopher and social scientist Theodor Adorno, and then on to Gershom Scholem, the philosopher who left Germany for Israel. It ended up in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where it sits mostly in the basement, deemed too precious to be shown.

The Angelus Novus also serves as a metaphor for Benjamin’s conception of history, which proved enormously influential throughout the 20th century. Benjamin used the angel, who always flies backwards, as a metaphor for the fact that, even as we think we look forward, we can only look at the past, spooling out behind us as an unceasing crisis.

“The idea for 421’s [curatorial] open call was catastrophe, and I immediately thought of Walter Benjamin's angel of history because he talks about the single ongoing catastrophe,” says Al-Jadir. “And the idea that any documents of civilisation are also evidence of barbarism — from the way that they’re transmitted from one owner to the next, they're tainted. So the idea of provenance also emerged from Benjamin, and the idea of investigating chains of custody.”

A number of works play with the question of who owns what at what point in history. Rand Abdul Jabbar, an Iraqi artist who grew up in Abu Dhabi, creates the installation May It Be Remembered (2023) around the overlapping subjects of institutional and personal memory.

Jabbar made nine figures from clay, evoking the statuary of Hatra, the ancient city in northern Iraq. She then filmed the installation in situ at 421, producing a video that extols not only the enduring memory of the objects, but the earth they are composed of, in a bravura convergence of people, land, material culture and belonging.

Near the end of the video, Jabbar includes footage of her own family trip to Hatra in 1999 — a source of inspiration for the work, Jabbar explains. Her aunts, she says, had pointed to a figurine above her uncle’s head, telling him to watch out. He replied that the gargoyle had been there for 2,000 years and wasn’t going anywhere soon; that very gargoyle was later destroyed by Isis, in a further twist to the dialectic of destruction and commemoration evoked by ancient sites.

Colonialism and conflict also run throughout — testimonies to how artefacts end up in museums, and why they stay there. The installation Wardat al Mustashar, or the Adviser’s Flower (2022), by Nasser Alzayani, displays diaries from the 1920s to 1950s by Charles Belgrave, the British advisor to the Emir of Bahrain.

Belgrave planted oleanders across Bahrain, allegedly because his wife loved the flower. Unbeknownst to him, and here in a parallel for colonial expansion, oleanders are an invasive species, and the flower varietal soon spread irrevocably across the island. For Alzayani, this irony is its own historical document, which he treats by juxtaposing Belgrave’s personal notions with his own diary detailing his research into the historical subject.

Fatma Uzdenova shows an iteration of her Museum of Banishment (2019), a commemoration of the thousands of women who were displaced by the Soviets in the North Caucasus. The installation, though, relies a bit too heavily on symbolic objects, superbly calls attention to the bodies that are absent in museum displays, particularly of objects worn by women.

A wrought-metal belt hangs spectrally in the air; two similarly wrought metal ornaments, used to adorn braided hair, stare out from the wall as if unclosed eyes. On a series of shelves, lumpen sacks fold in themselves atop stacks of literature around the displacement, like fat little snails guarding the proof of a historical catastrophe.

The And the Mirrors Are Many exhibition is the product of the one-year curatorial development programme that 421 formally launched two years ago. The Abu Dhabi-raised Al-Jadir responded to its open call with her proposal on Benjamin, and after winning the commission, she and other short-listed candidates joined seminars given by the Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research. She then worked with Sabih Ahmed, the curator of the Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai.

“Sabih is extremely well-read in the arts, philosophy and film,” says Al-Jadir. “And because he was formerly director of the Asia Art Archive, he has this incredible background in thinking through repositories of memory and colonial archives.”

“He also coached me through the practical aspects of curating. If I had any sort of issue, I would just ask him how he would go about this problem. That kind of advice and support is invaluable, especially for first time curators.”

The success of the exhibition shows the success of the programme — a group show around themes inspired by Benjamin is no easy first show to pull off, but And the Mirrors Are Many has emerged as one of the stand-outs of this year’s spring art season.

And the Mirrors Are Many is running at 421 at Zayed Port, Abu Dhabi until May 8