see picturesclerk.com/2009/12/06/society-of-estranged-lovers/
Composed from material sourced online, among them: 1) no
caption [Adhamiya wall], 2008 and 2) caption: “Immigrants,
carrying no travel documents, who said they were from Iraq
and had sailed from Lebanon, sit on the beach of Kato Zakros
on the Greek island of Crete on Thursday, Dec. 6, 2007”....
Retrieved with text from “Imprint” page of picturesclerk.com.
RHEIM ALKADHI, CAPTIVE LOVER
The following essay was first published in Majnoon Field Guide Rheim Alkadhi, published by Archive Books, 2023
Why is Iraq so easy to harm and so hard to help?
— PJ O’ Rourke, “The Backside of War: How I saved Iraq’s modern art, and other confessions. A noncombatant’s diary”, in The Atlantic.
So begins an extensive piece in the December 2003 issue in the presumably left-leaning American publication, The Atlantic. The writer, self-proclaimed libertarian and satirist P.J. O’ Rourke, writes from occupied Baghdad a detailed account of his observations of Iraqis and the American army members with whom he is embedded. In his account, the only things more distasteful, more ugly than the Iraqis are the second and third rate remnants of its culture. There is nothing of value to be found here, not in the people, the museums, the cities or the land. As he quotes Army Captain “Bob”, “After coming to the Mideast, it’s easy to see how they came up with the concept of zero”.
The journalist as private eye here has done his due diligence, and come up with nothing. Nothing to write home about (apart from imperial minded insults), nothing to save, nothing to lose, nothing to know more about, to be curious about, just, as he surmises, zero. In a place complex with both ancient and minute by minute histories being made in cities and towns whose fabrics are being systematically unmade, it would seem impossible to believe this account of Iraq as a zero, simply a running faultline of global power’s quakes. And yet it is not difficult to imagine readers finding the piece “real”, with its familiar brand of pull no punches, “politically incorrect” freeform war journalism that presumes irreverent reportage and merciless irony while reinventing and reiterating the bravado and brutality of dominance over fellow man. In politics, in culture, in the snuffing out of life. It is the ultimate privilege to find the humour in this, to be paid to find the words that culminate in a piece so breezily wicked, easily readable and seemingly gritty, published for the pleasure of so many thousands of pairs of American eyes, searching, and finding in every line, relief from care, culpability, the need for further interrogation. One could spend endless hours seething over the piece and its despicable portrayals; falsehoods presented as politically incorrect truths. There are lifetimes to spend outraged at the American political and cultural establishment and their myriad violent hypocrisies vis-à-vis the Iraq Wars and certainly, the humans they have targeted.
Methodological curiosity is the antidote. Artist Rheim Alkadhi has managed, in the extraterritorial scope of her work and with its searching texts, to shrug off what could easily become a smothering cloak of anguish. Instead, probing images, words, and trails of soil and beings culminate into embodiments of reconfigured realities, for the subjects of her curiosity and for the viewer. Where O’ Rourke saw zero, broadcast it out, Alkadhi begins an excavation of the vastness. There is no evidence of wasted minutes or breath spent trying to change people’s minds or affect opinion. No desperate grasps at humanising that Iraqi other or striving to make a case for the preservation of Iraqi blood, let alone culture. The radical nature of Alkadhi’s work and the words embedded within it is in how invisible the value propositions of war have been rendered, even as the works themselves are constructed directly out of the battlegrounds and thrum of their remains. Alkadhi’s works are made neither to represent nor to present an argument that might convince anyone of anything. We, as viewers, are all Captive Lovers, as one of her works from 2007 is titled, and in her text from the piece, we can find a philosophy that runs through the works in direct resistance to the emptiness of eradication.
Dear Reader,
I write with minimal hope. I also write with a desire to entertain gestures of love—even if none are found.
The prisoner of war (is what we have all become). I’ve sought out images depicting captives in the hands of their captors (the ones pictured above are from the 1967 Arab-Israeli War) for an ongoing project of subversion; to gain in the contest of representation, to deliver the reverse of bellicosity, to charge these moments with an intimate discourse.
Yours indefinitely,
Captive Lover
Alkadhi, who spent the first eight years of her life in Baghdad, returned several years ago to film what would become part of her exhibition, Majnoon Field. Majnoon Field is the name of one of the largest oil fields in the world, discovered in southern Iraq decades ago and still lit with the everburning flame of “discovery”. In the film, and in the works that are situated within the exhibition, there becomes a kind of revelatory registry of what lies under the surface at Majnoon and the land that surrounds it. There is a relentless inquisitiveness, an understanding that this is a place that holds decades old and up to the minute exchanges of global currencies, resources, militaries and labour movements.
Majnoon is that site where the most coveted object of affection lies beneath the surface, takes in heavy machinery, dollars, and labour to extract. It is at that site that Alkadhi begins her own process of extraction, as part of her “ongoing project of subversion”. In the frame her camera settles on a wide open field, nothing but the infinite torch of petroleum to break the distance. And in that zero she begins to take stock. Cataloging, in her own voice, what is strewn onto the land, in the water, embedded in the soil. We become acquainted, we become intimate. There is no face to draw us in, Alkadhi’s camera rests just below the contours of the neck. There is no thrill of attraction to create value. The thrill is in the uncovering of the depth, the world’s desires running under that earth. Beautiful architecture, bodies, landscapes, those temporal attractions are outside of concern, at least insofar as one can surmise from her work, which refuses to engage in questions of fleeting value.
In Alkadhi’s worlds, value is absolute. It is in the cataloging of dirt, in the gathering of the smallest fragment of hair. It is in all the things that comprise earth and breath. In the minutia of everything, lies evidence. Evidence of love, a mysterious body just beyond reach. There is always a slippery truth, the presentation of a fiction firmly embedded in a document’s form. In her films, writings, images and installations, there is the sense that Alkadhi has taken up the role of investigator, we can even see her collecting forensic and material research—bits of hair, soil, fabric. The search for an understanding of a body outlined on America’s news channels in an endless reel of maps, this one pinpoints to be eradicated, that one of possible federations to be divided into. In fierce opposition to these mappings and what they present, war, and the ask of the viewer, to become a warmonger, is Alkadhi’s alternative index. Her long-used online repository, picturesclerk.com, the antithesis of the 24 hour news cycle developed on the occasion of and for the first Iraq War. In this site, that endless reel turns to sculpture, to shades of color, to reimaging scenes that show the viewer what might be if the blow was a caress. Added words take us to a world that could have been, not as a gift but a need to evaluate survival’s many forms and our own culpability in the acts that necessitate the need for it.
This too is part of Iraq’s rich complexity. What becomes easy to dismiss in think pieces about “sectarianism” or barren landscapes with inextricable ancient strife is in actuality the site of the most contemporary battles over the life affirming and most natural of resources, oil and water. Today, 80% of Iraq’s flowing waters from the Tigris and Euphrates have been diverted by neighboring countries, its gulf steeped in saline and debris. That Majnoon mega oil field lies in southern Iraq, described as a land above an ocean of oil. In its major port and oil city, Basra, billions of dollars are exchanged amongst multinational gas companies and their affiliate industries while the city sinks into lower and lower forms of degradation. Nearly every facet of infrastructure apart from oil is in disarray, the poverty rate is 40% according to OHCHR. Its 2020 report noted that “poor economic conditions have exacerbated the poverty rate in the governorate and the area’s natural resources are bringing nothing to the residents except disease, unemployment and the seizure of their farmland”. Headlines about the speeding up of climate change due to oil flares in Iraq, and their effect on surrounding populations, cancer and birth defects, are matched by stories of children’s faces literally darkened by their bright, enduring light.
These conditions have been met with equally enduring protest from its residents, the southern cities long being a stronghold of anti-regime resistance prior to America’s wars and a large reason for its initial destruction and ongoing punishment. Rotting bodies of water, plant life and future possibility are present alongside those who have fought for accountability, the right to resources, and, as infamously put by Iraq’s protestors, a homeland. Alkadhi’s footage of this very landscape was marked by a bird’s flutter, her words foretelling the new waves of protest to come. To know the soil and the various life that springs from it is to know how to predict what a future may yield. Alkadhi’s work is wise to look to Iraq’s most valued sites, because they are the world’s most contested, and to know what springs from this is to begin to understand which directions our worlds, and the lives within it, may be moving. But Rheim’s work doesn’t direct us to look at the body, the face, the deceased or the embattled, and feel something, be it anger, sympathy, indifference. It is profoundly tactile, unapologetically generous in the inevitably harsh tenderness of its landscapes. Alkadhi doesn’t look at those landscapes, or that evidence she picks up, to wonder about herself, to make or inspire in others summations about the worlds she finds herself exploring. Too many are convinced that the right photograph, the right story, the right vignette might do the trick, produce empathy, wring water from the stone. This belief is like many, based in a faith that overlooks historical precedent and underestimates the subject simultaneously.
The search is never a conquest or a road travelled to make “informed judgements” or proclamations about scorched earths or political conundrums. The road is to the centre of what lies in the aftermath of power’s strike. What lies after the day after. To bring it forth, in all of its small bits and impossible questions, into a space sculpted, placed carefully, for a directed meditation of this kind.
Alkadhi has known what many in the world are now starting to come to terms with, that there is nothing a portrait alone can tell us. Iraq has been painted and painted over too many times for one to count or most to care. Instead of working under the promise of pretence, she forges a new visual coda. At times, the colors rise out of decades of experiential sediment of which there is no comparison. It may be true that no one weeps with the sections of earth Alkadhi chronicles, shares in the grief of too many bodies enriching the ground or the stench too many crises leaves behind. That the only feeling that can come close to that kind of pain is the pain of love. Longing, daydreams of the future, regret for what once was, ferociously questioning what could have been. In the rush of the first throes there is nothing but generosity. The most mundane qualities are a delight, the most grotesque a puzzle into the beloved’s past. Alkadhi’s works are formed in the generosity of that first rush. Refusing no part of the whole, they are an archive of unconditional acceptance of what is and a transformative critique of what could be. If to live today is to know that we may all be at risk of being left behind, the studies presented in Alkadhi’s work become essential guides.
- Rijin Sahakian