sada — RIJIN SAHAKIAN

_ABOUT

Director, Sada (echo)
for Iraqi art

2010-2015

In 2010, I embarked on what would become an arts and education project in Baghdad: Sada. The Arabic word sada translates to “echo”; the use of sound to calculate the distance between two points was how I initially conceptualized what Sada could do. At the time, I knew Baghdad through my family, writing it down as my birth city on passport applications and official paperwork. I knew it through visits as a child and teenager, having flown there on an otherwise empty plane in the late 80s and having driven alongside massive semi trucks on a route from Amman in the late 90s, when a post–Gulf War no-fly zone had made it the only way we could get in. In 2010, seven years after the second US-led war against Iraq, I went to Baghdad again, this time on a direct flight. The first US-led war on Iraq, two decades prior to that flight, flooded television screens and instructed the world, through its images of high-tech bombardment, that Iraqis no longer held a right to life. The shuttering of Iraq by the global coalition created a bizarre situation for all Iraqis, perhaps most of all those living in its storied and devastated capital. They could reside in the center of the world’s attention, and in its crosshairs, but remain, above all, isolated and shut out of its consciousness.

Tired of this dichotomy, I wanted to work with artists in that center, not those circulating or producing outside of it. In 2011, I began working with emerging artists and art students in Baghdad—some from the Institute of Fine Arts, some from the Baghdad University College of Art, some unaffiliated—in order to find ways to connect material to production, and to make space for critical conversations on work and experience. The project was small in scale. I was based for the most part in Amman, then Beirut, nearby cities from which I could engage and recruit Arabic-speaking artist-teachers. The artists in Baghdad weren’t attending dual-language schools, as the previously excellent education system in Iraq had been heavily impacted since the early 90s. Moreover, they didn’t have multiple passports and access to art programs overseas, unlike the vast majority of artists presented on the Middle East global arts circuit. Sada was meant to meet the artists in Baghdad in the extraordinary place where they were. The majority of our workshops were taught online, via Skype, before COVID mainstreamed distance-learning technology and terminology; the wars had already made this a necessity for us, with the distinction that, in our case, the at-risk population was targeted.

Within five years, we had encountered issues with students unable to travel to workshops due to car bombs, political infiltrators, and, finally, the encroachment of ISIS into Baghdad. Our programs ended in 2015, and since then several of the original members of Sada, like so much of the population, have come to reside outside Iraq’s borders. - Excerpted from World Records Journal, Volume 8

Director, Sada (echo)for Iraqi art

2010-2015

Further Reading

Director, Sada (echo)
for Iraqi art