Iraq: Reframe
The following essay on the 2007-2008 exhibition Iraq: Reframe was prepared as a contribution for Hello, Goodbye, Hello: The Sally and Don Lucas Artists Residency Program at the Montalvo Arts Center, and reprinted with permission. ©2024 Montalvo Association.
In the summer of 2007, nearly six thousand Iraqi civilians were killed every month. The US-led occupation bred violence that scorched every citizen, sparking an eventual mass exodus of more than four million Iraqis, a count that continues as an enduring legacy of invasion.
One might say that, today, we have been inured to news of violence in Iraq. Details about the ever-increasing populations under threat or in flight are too extreme, almost too obscene to warrant grief or acknowledgment. But back in that summer, on the other side of the world, on the other side of California’s Santa Cruz Mountains, I sat at my desk, watching Baghdad burn on a monitor. Just beyond my screen was an idyllic world formed by the sloping architecture, dappling light, and silence of a well-appointed international artist residency nestled in the hills of Silicon Valley. Watching a war unfold in your homeland, from the nation waging it, is akin to the grief of losing a loved one. You can’t believe others can go on living, having coffee, chatting about work, while you are steeped in irreparable loss.
It was during this period that Montalvo’s leadership team began discussing launching a series of yearlong initiatives based on “issues of our time.” I was in my mid-twenties and had been serving as a residency manager at the Lucas Artists Program for about a year. I was new to the idea of curating, but the artist-led projects I was able to learn from and assist in shaping had fast-tracked my sense of possibility, just as the absence of Iraq from American consciousness accelerated my formation of a new initiative. Gordon Knox, then director of the LAP, was a generous mentor and fully supported my proposal: nine months of programming dedicated to a relationship most people wanted to ignore—the one between Iraq and America.
Over the next year nearly twenty programs—including installations, exhibitions, lectures, symposia, music, poetry, and theater—were launched under the rubric of Iraq: Reframe. The title of the initiative reflected my desire to build a public discourse with those for whom Iraq was a foundation of their critical and creative work.
Though there is increasing focus on the difficulty of obtaining visas by those in countries targeted by the US military, it is hardly a new problem. Iraq: Reframe took place nearly seventeen years ago, and even then we were unable to procure visas for Iraq-based practitioners. What did take place were exhibitions of modern Iraqi art in the galleries, alongside sculpture on the grounds. Poetry workshops with the Saratoga public library and local schools utilized Iraqi and regional authors. Partnerships with the California College of the Arts and with the Aurora Forum series of events at Stanford University included novelist Sinan Antoon, Washington Post journalist Anthony Shadid, playwright and performer Heather Raffo, and artist Michael Rakowitz. The wraparound programs were what we envisioned at the time as an accessible, multidisciplinary initiative.
More importantly, there was time. There was space. There was the allowance of risk by both the institution and the artists themselves.
Under the wing of the Lucas Artists Program, the initiative also allowed new connections to be made. Artists were invited to Montalvo not simply to present a project but to stay awhile, to meet one another, and to spend time discovering what the residency could offer beyond the usual time frame of a single talk or an exhibition opening. And because the artist residency is designed as a site of process rather than of production, the projects, meetings, and ideas that emerged were not bound by the original parameters of the initiative, the way they might have been for a museum exhibition.
Iraq: Reframe was a success by most metrics, despite some members of the Montalvo staff having worried that discussing an ugly and highly divisive war may not be the best way for the organization to endear itself to its local community. But Montalvo is not a museum; its arts programs primarily grow from its artist residents rather than collections or readymade objects. Therefore, much of the programming that took place was through residency based productions, with their engagement with the surrounding community and the public serving as partners. One of Montalvo’s greatest gifts during that period was its offering of a unique site where both material support and longer, collaborative processes—even those considered “risks”—were made possible.
Seventeen years later, I still feel about my time at the residency the wayI did when I inhabited the sculpted walls of the Lucas Artists Program. On the one hand, it is a unique environment, one with peaceful surroundings, abundant funding, natural beauty, and dedicated staff, but on the other, the residency is indicative of a larger, national condition of isolation. A residency can feel like a world unto itself, and in the case of the LAP, it is situated within a particularly rarefied space: at the heart of global technology production in Silicon Valley. Here, just a few miles from the artist studios, technologies used to fight wars were and continue to be developed and advanced, with little corresponding discourse on, or research into, the violence waged.
At the time, I wanted to see if we couldn’t make the intimate relationship between Iraq and Silicon Valley more transparent, naively thinking we might shift a few perceptions, or even local discourse. But the kinds of revelations that time provides aren’t just for the artists. Toward the final months of the initiative, I found myself at the end of my tenure at the Lucas Artists Program. After working closely with so many to try and build a new way of engaging with Iraq, I realized that participating from afar—from the United States—was inadequate. I left Montalvo to embark on a new project, working with art students in Baghdad. The hallmark gifts the residency had offered—time, space, and security—are precisely what the wars had stolen from the Baghdad-based artists I worked with. Despite this, they produced urgent, complex work from a site of occupation that, without their consent, became a focal point for American examination of the “issues of our time.”
- Rijin Sahakian