Dr Donny George Youkhanna, former director general of the National Museum of Iraq, was the guardian of that country’s history and cultural patrimony – until he began getting death threats.
Forced to flee Iraq in 2006 after the United States-led invasion, he ended up in New York teaching at Stony Brook University.
In 2007, he walked into the Lombard Freid Projects gallery space in New York to find it filled with familiar objects – life-size replicas of the artefacts looted from the museum in 2003, made not from stone but from the colourful packaging of Iraqi foodstuffs and scraps of Arabic newspaper.
Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz was in Chicago when his gallery notified him that Dr George, as he was known, could be seen in the gallery every day. He had started giving impromptu tours of the artefacts, just as he had for the original works at the Museum in Baghdad.
“I was so moved,” Rakowitz says. “He and I spoke by phone and he told me how emotional he got because I had recreated these objects that are gone forever, and they were the exact size and had the right thickness, but they were made out of [different materials] that succeeded in making the ghost.
“He said that was as close as he was ever going to get to those objects again.”
The works that so captured the imagination of Dr George, who died of a heart attack in 2011, were part of a series Rakowitz has been working on for a decade. The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist began in 2007, when Rakowitz pledged to recreate every artefact looted or destroyed during the invasion of Iraq.
In recent years, he has also added objects stolen or demolished by ISIL to his list. To date, he has recreated 700 objects from a list of 7,000, all using food wrappers and Arabic newspapers.
His sculptures lament the loss of Iraq’s cultural heritage but also speak for the loss of human life that accompanies acts of iconoclasm.
“There was a theory that I loved … that people would take these votive sculptures that one finds throughout Mesopotamia to the temples to pray,” he says.
“The votive sculpture was left behind as a surrogate for the person who was praying, while that person went back to their daily life. I liked the idea that these objects could become surrogates for the hundreds of thousands – millions – of Iraqis whose lives were completely destroyed, in one way or another, by the US-led invasion.”
One of Rakowitz’s sculptures was recently selected to top the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2018. Built in 1841, the plinth was intended to hold a sculpture of William IV but was left empty when the funds ran out.
Since 1999, it has been topped by a succession of works by contemporary artists. Rakowitz’s piece is a 14-foot-long reconstruction of the statue of a lamassu – a winged bull with a human head – that guarded the Nergal Gate in Nineveh, near Mosul, from 700BC until it was destroyed by ISIL in 2015. The colourful sculpture is made from empty cans of Iraqi date syrup.
“Using these temporary materials, like the detritus of Middle Eastern foodstuffs, has something to do with tracking the visibility of Middle Eastern culture in the United States, where my grandparents moved when they had to leave Baghdad in 1946,” he explains.
“I was enlisting these fragments of cultural visibility in the United States to remake these things that are now, for all intents and purposes, invisible.”
The sculpture shows the front of the lamassu, as well as the flat back, where it would have been attached to the gate it was supposed to guard.
The original artefact was reduced to rubble by ISIL, but Rakowitz consulted with archaeologists who told him there was Cuneiform writing on the back of the statue.
The words recreated on the sculpture resonate profoundly at a time in which the number of refugees globally is the highest ever recorded, and attitudes to migration are dividing societies around the world. “The translation is ‘Sennacherib, king of Assyria, king of the world, had the inner and outer walls built anew and raised them as high as mountains,’” says Rakowitz.
“So we’re talking about walls, we’re talking about power and something that comes from these ancient kingdoms, to warn us from the past.”
Rakowitz views his sculptures as “phantoms” – not replacements for, but ghosts of the lost artefacts.
He hopes his lamassu will serve a similar symbolic role as the almost 3,000-year-old artefact ISIL destroyed.
“It’s going to be positioned south-east, looking back towards Nineveh,” he says.
“My hope is that after the two years it’s on show in Trafalgar Square, I can gift it to Iraq, so that it can replace what was lost and it can still be a guardian of the past, the present and the future of Iraq’s memories.”
artslife@thenational.ae
Company%20Profile
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Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989
Director: Goran Hugo Olsson
Rating: 5/5
PROFILE OF SWVL
Started: April 2017
Founders: Mostafa Kandil, Ahmed Sabbah and Mahmoud Nouh
Based: Cairo, Egypt
Sector: transport
Size: 450 employees
Investment: approximately $80 million
Investors include: Dubai’s Beco Capital, US’s Endeavor Catalyst, China’s MSA, Egypt’s Sawari Ventures, Sweden’s Vostok New Ventures, Property Finder CEO Michael Lahyani
England's lowest Test innings
- 45 v Australia in Sydney, January 28, 1887
- 46 v West Indies in Port of Spain, March 25, 1994
- 51 v West Indies in Kingston, February 4, 2009
- 52 v Australia at The Oval, August 14, 1948
- 53 v Australia at Lord's, July 16, 1888
- 58 v New Zealand in Auckland, March 22, 2018
Founders: Abdulmajeed Alsukhan, Turki Bin Zarah and Abdulmohsen Albabtain.
Based: Riyadh
Offices: UAE, Vietnam and Germany
Founded: September, 2020
Number of employees: 70
Sector: FinTech, online payment solutions
Funding to date: $116m in two funding rounds
Investors: Checkout.com, Impact46, Vision Ventures, Wealth Well, Seedra, Khwarizmi, Hala Ventures, Nama Ventures and family offices
The%20specs
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SPEC%20SHEET%3A%20APPLE%20M3%20MACBOOK%20AIR%20(13%22)
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COMPANY%20PROFILE
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Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha
Starring: Ajay Devgn, Tabu, Shantanu Maheshwari, Jimmy Shergill, Saiee Manjrekar
Director: Neeraj Pandey
Rating: 2.5/5
Key products and UAE prices
iPhone XS
With a 5.8-inch screen, it will be an advance version of the iPhone X. It will be dual sim and comes with better battery life, a faster processor and better camera. A new gold colour will be available.
Price: Dh4,229
iPhone XS Max
It is expected to be a grander version of the iPhone X with a 6.5-inch screen; an inch bigger than the screen of the iPhone 8 Plus.
Price: Dh4,649
iPhone XR
A low-cost version of the iPhone X with a 6.1-inch screen, it is expected to attract mass attention. According to industry experts, it is likely to have aluminium edges instead of stainless steel.
Price: Dh3,179
Apple Watch Series 4
More comprehensive health device with edge-to-edge displays that are more than 30 per cent bigger than displays on current models.
The%20Afghan%20connection
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Federer's 19 grand slam titles
Australian Open (5 titles) - 2004 bt Marat Safin; 2006 bt Marcos Baghdatis; 2007 bt Fernando Gonzalez; 2010 bt Andy Murray; 2017 bt Rafael Nadal
French Open (1 title) - 2009 bt Robin Soderling
Wimbledon (8 titles) - 2003 bt Mark Philippoussis; 2004 bt Andy Roddick; 2005 bt Andy Roddick; 2006 bt Rafael Nadal; 2007 bt Rafael Nadal; 2009 bt Andy Roddick; 2012 bt Andy Murray; 2017 bt Marin Cilic
US Open (5 titles) - 2004 bt Lleyton Hewitt; 2005 bt Andre Agassi; 2006 bt Andy Roddick; 2007 bt Novak Djokovic; 2008 bt Andy Murray
BORDERLANDS
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis
Director: Eli Roth
Rating: 0/5
The bio
Academics: Phd in strategic management in University of Wales
Number one caps: His best-seller caps are in shades of grey, blue, black and yellow
Reading: Is immersed in books on colours to understand more about the usage of different shades
Sport: Started playing polo two years ago. Helps him relax, plus he enjoys the speed and focus
Cars: Loves exotic cars and currently drives a Bentley Bentayga
Holiday: Favourite travel destinations are London and St Tropez
The Florida Project
Director: Sean Baker
Starring: Bria Vinaite, Brooklynn Prince, Willem Dafoe
Four stars
The%20specs
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Specs%3A%202024%20McLaren%20Artura%20Spider
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