Archaic

The catalogue of the Pavilion of Iraq at the 57th Venice Biennale, this book presents eight Iraqi artists of different generations Sherko Abbas, Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, Ali Arkady, Luay Fadhil, Shakir Hassan Al Said, Nadine Hatton, Jewad Selim, and Sakar Sleman together with work made by Francis Alÿs when he was embedded with a battalion of Peshmerga near Mosul, and a stunning collection of artefacts from the Iraq Museum of Baghdad. Tellingly, archaic is also the Western view of the other, of a war-torn land that is easier to view as such than anything else. Archaic is the approach of the visual arts, the overwhelming rich heritage of the past with the overbearing paucity of the present. All the work featured in this book draws out the tension in the term archaic, to emphasise its particular relevance to Iraq, a country where the existing political, administrative, social and economic reality is arguably as archaic as its ancient heritage.