Ibrahimi collection Visited the Exhibition - Baghdad Mona Amoure (Baghdad My Love ) at Institut des Cultures d’Islam (ICI) (Institute of Cultures of Islam ) in Paris From March 29 to July 29, 2018
With the works of Sherko Abbas, Latif Al Ani, Resmi Al Kafaji, Assaf Ali, Salam Atta Sabri, Julien Audebert, Dia Azzawi, Himat, Hanaa Malallah, Mehdi Moutashar, Mosul Eye Office, Michael Rakowitz, Jewad Selim, Lorna Selim, Walid Siti, Sharif Waked and Ala Younis
Commissariat: Morad Montazami
Artistic direction: Bérénice Saliou
The exhibition Baghdad Mon Amour is about artistic strategies of reinvention of the Iraqi heritage, devastated by decades of war. Mostly from Iraq, the artists gathered here seek to overcome the looting and destruction of museums and archaeological sites from Baghdad to Mosul. These phenomena, already present under Saddam Hussein, have been systematized since the 2000s following the second Gulf War led by the United States and their allies, and more recently with the cultural massacres perpetrated by the terrorist group Islamic State. By revealing the protective impulse of these artists, which is expressed in the form of allegory, parody, archeology or montage, Baghdad Mon Amour summons the utopia of a "museum without walls" to confront the Iraq catastrophe. Far from nostalgia, a constellation of modern and contemporary works of art, archival documents and nomadic signs celebrates a visual culture that resists erasure. The anxiety generated by the ghost objects, disappeared from the museums, gives way to the collective imagination to sketch a possible rebirth of Baghdad, between gestures of preservation and reinvention.
Throughout the exhibition, many events honor Iraq from antiquity to the present day. Come listen to "The Epic of Gilgamesh", one of the oldest stories in the world, dance with the quartet Radio Baghdad on sounds at the crossroads of the East and the West, and let you move by the idyll of Salima Mourad and Nazem El Ghazali, great Iraqi singers of the early 20th century. Participate in conferences on safeguarding heritage in conflict zones, the situation of journalists in Iraq, the battle of Mosul, the architectural and literary modernism of Iraq, or the history of great figures such as the philosopher Al-Farabi, the poet Al Mutanabbi and Caliph al-Ma'mun.
With films and documentaries, the daily life of a family before and after the fall of Saddam Hussein, in the heart of the unknown destiny of the archaeologist and spy Gertrude Bell, in the grandiose landscapes of Kurdistan and in the maze of fantasy streets. of a Baghdad in Technicolor ...
From March to July, Baghdad and Iraq are to see and love at ICI!
For more information you can visit the website : https://www.institut-cultures-islam.org/bagdad-mon-amour/
