SADA [REGROUP]
video, 54 min, 2022
with Sajjad Abbas, Bassim Al Shaker, Ali Eyal, and Sarah Munaf. In Arabic with English subtitles, and English with Arabic subtitles
Commissioned by documenta fifteen
Sada was an online and in person ad hoc art school in Baghdad, which ran from 2011 to 2015, in order to support artists facing cycles of war, destruction, sanctions, and continual political insecurity. As a commissioned artist for documenta fifteen, I invited former participants of Sada to come together again after ten years, to reflect on our creative and disparate lives since that time.
The participating artists were Sajjad Abbas (film, Water of Life), Bassim Al Shaker (Barbershop), Ali Eyal (The Blue Ink Pocket), Sarah Munaf (Journey Inside the City), and myself (Anthem). These videos comprise one experimental film, Sada [regroup], on individual and collective art practice in a protracted era of international warfare.
Using street footage, narrative, and documentary, Sajjad Abbas’s Water of Life tracks its filmmakers’ urge to forge protest that is bigger than himself, following monumental artwork, migration, and the return to place and protest. In Ali Eyal’s The Blue Ink Pocket, a mysterious letter from an artist is authored to communicate the futility of describing violence in full, its scattering of meaning, and the power it derives through its lesser understood perpetrators and permutations. In Journey Inside a City, shot in Iraq, Turkey, and Ukraine, Sarah Munaf layers her experience as a sculptor and as part of a threatened community of artists and residents in Baghdad, and, later, as a refugee finding her way in coastal Turkey as her parents navigate life in Ukraine. In Barbershop, stop-motion animation, cutout drawings, and first-person storytelling give shape to the artist Bassim Al Shaker’s memory of his own kidnapping and its impact on his personal and creative life in the years that followed. Taking moments from popular and political culture during the 1991 Iraq war and the second invasion of Iraq, Rijin Sahakian’s Anthem traces her experience of multinational warfare in its varying methodologies.
For further reading on the project from each artist, visit World Records Journal. To view the films, visit the World Records Screening Room.
Reviews
“A compilation of beautiful, frightening and complex films by members of Sada (Regroup), a kind of ad hoc alternative art education initiative that has helped young film-makers in Baghdad, provide some of the best, most inventive and emotionally difficult works to be found at Documenta 15.” - Welcome to the fun house! Sharks, skaters and smelters liven up Documenta 15, The Guardian, June 23, 2022
“Some of the standout moments for me in Kassel resulted from the work of curators. This included a film series presented under the banner of Sada [REGROUP], an initiative established by Rijin Sahakian.... The series involved seven Baghdad-based artists including Sahakian herself and the three artists who withdrew from the Berlin Biennale…The superbly rich and rewarding film series was matchless in giving context to the complex reality these artists face.” - The Curating of Crisis and the Crisis of Curating, ART NOW, Dec. 9, 2022
“One screening room focuses on the legacy of Sada, a collective set up in 2011 to support artists and students in post-occupation Iraq, so completely memory-holed in the U.S. after official military withdrawal. The group’s founder Rijin Sahakian has a film essay that lucidly lays out how recent U.S. culture was shaped by the recent geopolitical crime. Her work has a sense for the darkly resonant image that makes the charges stick, but it’s also memorably direct, without poeticizing its subject.” - Documenta 15’s Focus on Populist Art Opens the Door to Art Worlds You Don’t Otherwise See—and May Not Always Want to, Artnet, July 6, 2022
“The most moving art I saw at documenta…this series of films needs to be shown and seen as widely as possible.” - The Art of Precarity, Bangkok Post, Oct. 13, 2022
“Still, there were a few gems within the communal offerings, such as Sada (regroup), led by Baghdad-born-artist Rijin Sahakian, who screened films at the Fridericianum by artists who had been part of the now-inactive Baghdad Collective, which supported Iraqi artists between 2011 and 2015. One of them, The Blue Ink Pocket (2022) by Ali Eyal, was a Kafkaesque narrative of a world in which art could travel but people couldn’t, with paintings acting as ghostly witnesses, arriving in parts like dismembered bodies.” -The DIY Chaos of Documenta 15, Freize, July 7, 2022
Documenta 15 presents projects and ways of creating from the global South, Vogue Brazil, June 29, 2022
Documenta fifteen: Collective solidarity seeping through authoritarian pressures - border_less, June 18, 2022
Fear of Lumbung Planet, X-tra Journal, Fall 2023