Rawan Almukhtar:
No Before or After
by Rijin Sahakian
For the 2024 edition of the Kunsthalle Wien Preis exhibition, the following essay was published in a new book in German and English by Kunsthalle Wien. For this edition, Rawan Almukhtar and Ida Kammerloch were selected by a jury of curators and artists.
CERTAIN SUBJECTS ARE LIMITLESS: accumulating layers of experience compress, shift, and reform what and how we remember, the ways we consider who we are, and what lies within the realities we have been confronted with, perhaps imagined.
Painting is a testament to this—works that outline the same figures and topics, made anew again and again by the expansive nature of subjectivity. Contrary to the popular saying, history never repeats itself. Rather, it is a new, wholly unique confrontation with the energies that comprise and surround us, on every point on Earth: infinite paths of horror and pleasure are carved.
Rawan Almukhtar’s paintings bring this subjectivity into focus through a technique that resembles compiled snapshots forming a haze of colour, admitting the outline of a moment. He reserves the delineations of black-and-white sketches for evidence, not experience—an American tank alongside the palms that line Baghdad’s streets, the assault rifles manufactured in Austria. In these two works alone, ink and print—the traditional tools employed to write and share facts—are utilised by the artist to circumvent their suppression in the wider world of news and information. For example, he reveals the little-known fact that Austrian-made weapons were used by militias to kill or the realities of US occupation in Iraqi streets. In the tremors that shook Baghdad under the tanks and bombs of American invasion and occupation, Almukhtar allows his hand to be seen through the shakiness of the drawings—scenes that patrolling US soldiers ordered him, then a child, not to photograph. The attempted disciplining of his street, his camera, his fingers around the pen, is not erased through his recording of the urban scenes in ink, but rather, memorialised by their nature: quickly drawn testimonies that defy occupation’s orders.
These works recall the highly circulated drawings of Steve Mumford, an American artist who embedded himself with the US Army. In these illustrations and paintings, the scenes are depicted through the vantage point of a military unit. Unable to acknowledge his protected position within a brigade of occupying forces operating inside a country and people he has no investment in beyond his own curiosity and career, Mumford describes his approach as follows, “These aren’t anti-war paintings. They aren’t political. I’m not trying to address the morality of war, or George Bush’s foreign policy agenda. I went to Iraq because I wanted to know what being in a war zone was like, and paint about it from my own subjective experiences. The events in the paintings are either things I saw or things that happened nearby. I found being in a war zone addictive.” 1
Certainly, it is not the occupied who find being in a war zone “addictive.” What Mumford articulates here is in direct opposition to the kind of neutrality he pretends at. It is the luxury of an invader to foster an addiction to war. To proudly proclaim this denial of political or moral questioning is a form of entitlement fundamentally unencumbered by the world-ending realities of war. That he does not question the invasion of a populous sovereign nation that would result in death squads, mass illegal imprisonment, massacres, and environmental decay on a nationwide scale is, of course, one of the most extreme personal stances one can take. It is the admission of witnessing dominance and the extinguishing of human life for personal and creative curiosity, for sport and exhilaration. Mumford is not alone in this; much of the creative work and reporting that came out of the Iraq War, from news articles to film, depicted the human and ecological genocides in Iraq perpetrated by the Americans and their multinational coalition partners as a murky blur with no accountability to be extracted from the carefully planned, comprehensively violent alteration of Iraq’s resources, populations, and built and environmental infrastructures.
Almukhtar’s works then not only press up against the orders not to photograph, but also this presentation of the war as void of deserving critical response, responsibility, or reparations. In his archive series, it is Iraqi residents, homes, streets, and actions that take up the space. The titles too, point to action: Witnessing, Protest. Almukhtar does not allow for the comfort of neutrality in Austria, the country he immigrated to in 2015. Evidencing the eight hundred Austrian-made sniper rifles circulating in countries including Iraq, his 2021 photogravure project, The Chosen Arm, makes it impossible to deny Austria’s involvement in the killing of civilians far outside its own borders. This act of laying bare the machinery of taking life, its circulation and denial, has come, like much of his work, from research rooted in experience. Experience that could never lead to an “addiction to war zones,” but one that erases the very possibility of this statement itself, exposing the vulgarity of what those who have not lived through specific wars pretend to know, or to share, of its demands on the living.
The assault rifles in Almukhtar’s prints link directly to the years-long, targeted killing of more than six hundred protestors in Iraq,2 many of them young people and students, in an attempt to crush the Tishreen Movement, beginning in October 2019. Also known as the October Revolution, the grassroots, nationwide protest bore the slogan “We Want a Homeland,” speaking to the desire for a government free from entrenched corruption and punishing, far-reaching consequences. The immensity of the protests—which saw citizens come together to support one another, organise together, feed each other, and confront the violent injustice of years of occupation, theft, and exploitation—was unprecedented.
This generosity of organising, and the courage to stand against armed forces, was met with crushing brutality. Young people were taken by kidnapping, by the launching of tear gas canisters, and finally, by sniper fire. Iraqis throughout the world shared the anguish of those mourning the terror their children and loved ones endured, after already surviving decades of war, sanctions, and invasion. Almukhtar faced this loss personally, and while his work paused for some time after, what fuelled the revolution, and saturates the afterlives of those left behind, has a continual presence in his works; there is no before and no after.
The wars in Iraq may be the most monumental series of global events the world, let alone the art world, never caught up to. Almukhtar was born in 1991, the year the first Gulf War took place. In 1991, the world first saw the use of space technology for warfare, gaming as a test run for absolute dominance, and the galvanisation of an unprecedented international coalition to shatter the infrastructure of a civilian populace, laying the groundwork for the first of what would become a series of refugee crises and the displacement of millions. In the following decade, the “war on terror” would shadow Desert Storm with its reach into Iraq as a site of spectacular occupation, torture, and exploitation, extending into Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Syria. A 2023 report from Brown University’s Costs of War project has attempted to estimate the massive number of lives taken in these countries: “A reasonable and conservative estimate suggests that at least 4.5 million people have died in the major post-9/11 war zones.”3 The causes of death included in the report are not only direct killing by bombs or armies, but those that accompany war: food and economic uncertainty, healthcare and structural collapse, displacement, trauma, environmental chaos, and contamination. These conditions, so easily ignored years ago, are now increasingly altering the world and its populace, human and non-human alike.
The reality reflected in these numbers is beyond comprehension, perhaps, for most. The mind goes quickly to abstraction. In Almukhtar’s paintings, there is a sense of this, but from an opposing perspective. By creating works that look as though one is trying to focus a camera, twisting the lens to get a distinct shot that never comes, he honours the impossibility of containing the vastness of catastrophe, of total and complete unmooring of home, of breath, in one image. The abstraction isn’t in the space between oneself and a hundred or a million people dying in a country you can’t name across the world, but in the space of knowing, intimately, the people in those unknown places. It is in knowing the coldness of the coldest water taking you and a dozen strangers to one border, and then another. The coldness of a body you can never touch again. The coldness of knowing one million of you died, and there will be no mourning.
Almukhtar’s figures live here, suffused in colour; he warms them. In the trembling of waves and the humans above them, he gives the attendant heat of attention. Through the touchpoints of a life jacket or a shoulder, the slipperiness of mortality is suspended, the experience of facing it, held tight. The viewer doesn’t need to recognise the faces to care about them. Almukhtar may already know how little this matters. We are not drawn into the paintings by their identification with particular features or nation-states, but by a kind of sharded, stained-glass effect that actually prevents the viewer from establishing a fixed grief or finality to the subject in play. Leaving the images in a state of flux, we come back to this space that has no before or after, no convenient end or postscript. They are alive in their continuous movement. We may know better now that wars hardly end when official dates are set, but are inscribed in the soil, species, and air long after the last troops have left. Munitions burrow, whole populaces move, climates change. All of this is multiplied, refracted, and magnified in Almukhtar’s triangulated shades, angular prints, and insistent authorship.
1. “Steve Mumford: The War in Iraq,” Postmasters Gallery, n.d., https://www.postmastersart.com/
archive/mumford06/mumford06.html.
2. “Iraq’s Tishreen Uprising: From Barricades to Ballot Box,” International Crisis Group, Report no. 223, 26 July 2021, https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-eastnorth-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/iraq/223-iraqs-tishreen-uprising-barricades-ballot-box.
3. Stephanie Savell, “How Death Outlives War: The Reverberating Impact of the Post-9/11 Wars on Human Health,” Costs of War, Watson Institute, Brown University, 15 May 2023, Executive Summary PDF download, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2023/
Indirect%20Deaths%20Executive%20Summary-2.pdf.