MAHMOUD OBAIDI: MOSQUITO EFFECTS

23 - 23 April 2023

  • Speaking truth to power has never been something Mahmoud Obaidi has shied away from in his work. The artist was introduced to the notion of injustice from his adolescence, and has since spent much of his life processing the destruction of his homeland and the isolation of exile. At the same time, he has found commonality in the suffering of a myriad of communities around the world who have also faced the brutal force of racism, occupation and inconceivable loss. In creating art which confronts these complex issues, Obaidi looks beyond simplistic politics and perceptions of identity, instead seeking to uncover and understand trauma from a historical, structural and geographical lens. As with much of Obaidi’s oeuvre, this latest body of work is made up of a multitude of layers which lie behind the external, visible yet abstract structures, shapes and colour, revealing a visual inquiry which goes far beyond the difficult topics which he seeks to tackle – namely colonisation and genocide ­– and simultaneously forces him to look within and explore his own personal sense of displacement.
  • During the 1980s, all of our generation was so surrounded by destruction that we could not help but make art. While many of my friends chose to write, I chose to paint

    In March 2021, Obaidi spoke during an online event about his previous collection of work, ‘Compact Home’, stating to the panel and the international audience: “there is no place called home”.  This perpetual sense of loss ­– loss of family, friends, identity, land and home – and the brutal physicality of being uprooted and thrown into unchartered, unstable territory has informed his very existence, seeping into his artistic output in a variety of ways. Born in 1966 in Iraq’s capital, Baghdad, Obaidi was influenced by his mother, a writer, who surrounded him with art and culture and encouraged him to develop his creative pursuits when he began to show artistic promise. He received a BA in fine art from the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad in 1990, the same year he had his very first solo exhibition, entitled ‘Cat’s Factory’, at the Museum of Modern Art (then called the Saddam Arts Centre). By that point, Iraq had already faced the impact of the Iran-Iraq War and it was beginning to feel the repercussions of the invasion of Kuwait, which resulted in the Gulf War and ensuing economic sanctions. The social environment that Obaidi was studying, graduating and exhibiting within, was a cocktail of heightened tensions and hyperpolitical rhetoric, and some of his earliest works showed signs of his natural inclination towards confronting political injustice. “During the 1980s, all of our generation was so surrounded by destruction that we could not help but make art. While many of my friends chose to write, I chose to paint”, Obaidi remembers.

  • The sanctions imposed upon Iraq severely limited the availability of art materials, and the state’s tight control over media and communications also limited exposure to the outside world, creating a suffocating environment for any artist. Obaidi left Iraq in 1991 via Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Thailand and China, seeking stability and peace. Instead, he felt stateless and stripped of a home, forced into exile from his homeland, which he could see crumbling from a distance. He eventually settled in Canada, where he found that stability he craved, continued his education and was able to resume his art practice. This relocation to North America not only provided him with a base to build a life on, but also opened his eyes to the historic and contemporary suffering and injustices of Indigenous communities in that region, feeling a sense of profound connection with their dispossession and longing. When Obaidi walked through an antique market in Venice one quiet Sunday afternoon, he came across a small papier-mache toy of a Native American man fighting a white man, clearly suggesting a classic problematic narrative of ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ or ‘civilised’ vs ‘savage’. Obaidi remembered the cowboy films he watched growing up, full of heroic scenes of fighting their enemies, who were seen as primitive anti-heroes. He bought the toy, and immediately was inspired to investigate the realities of this narrative and the places where it all came to life, becoming an ongoing project by Obaidi to commemorate victims, hold perpetrators to account, and also reflect personally on the deep scars left on the landscape and the bodies and souls of the dispossessed.
  • As part of this process, Obaidi experimented with videos, installations and more, but found that the story he was trying...

    As part of this process, Obaidi experimented with videos, installations and more, but found that the story he was trying to tell was best communicated through paintings. These paintings – all large-scale canvases with compositions in a range of media – appear as dark and obscured glimpses into this sombre story. He draws impressions of maps and landscapes, abstracted topography and linear grids denoting territories and divisions, all acting as the visual context for Indigenous loss and the brutality of colonisation. Some of these were based on, or inspired by, existing maps, including the ‘Trail of Tears’, a route of forced displacement of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations in the USA in the mid-1800s. The black outlines draw the viewer into the scene that Obaidi is setting, entering a hidden image and often left unaware whether they are entering violent chaos or leftover ruins in a barren landscape. Occasional shapes and suggestions of patterns, building structures, machinery, animals, plants and other vegetation accompany traces of tribal huts, stamped into the landscape but seemingly with no humans left to occupy them. Overlaid onto some of these complex terrains we also see evidence of the capitalist aims of the colonial aggressors, juxtaposing the Starbucks logo in the foreground with the devastated and abandoned scene in the background. The images, although they are not formally connected, subtly unite through the lines – straight, curved, whole or broken – which seem almost endless, like networks of connected communities, horrifying events and grim conclusions. These are all synchronised in a destructive timeline that has no beginning or end, and with a history that is not as distant as some may think.
  • When learning about the injustices faced by Indigenous communities in North America, Obaidi was particularly struck by the history of...

    When learning about the injustices faced by Indigenous communities in North America, Obaidi was particularly struck by the history of residential schools in Canada, which first opened in 1847. The Canadian government, alongside prominent churches, opened 130 boarding schools for Indigenous children who were taken from their homes and communities in order to ‘civilise’ them. Forcibly converted to Christianity, these children were in fact isolated from their native cultures and languages, reportedly made to clean their skin with bleach to whiten their complexion, and subjected to severe malnutrition, physical and sexual abuse, with thousands of child deaths at the hands of their teachers or due to neglect. The last residential school in Canada closed in 1996 in Montreal, with the traumatic impact of not only these school systems but also the dismantling of culture and community inevitably felt to this day. Obaidi felt deeply connected to them and to their stories of loss, violence and the standards imposed on them in order to assimilate. Although he could not directly compare his own story with the suffering of these children and their families, he saw the same themes resonate within him – the racism he found upon leaving Iraq, the destruction of his native land as part of a wider aim to occupy and colonise it, and the immense loss of culture and home felt by his people. He also saw direct parallels between the stories of genocide in Indigenous communities of North America and the Palestinian Nakba, seeing the latter as modern genocide (and the destruction of Iraq as contemporary genocide).

  • All of these themes have appeared heavily in Obaidi’s earlier work, including ‘Compact Home’ (2005–15), a series of dafatir – a term for artist’s books – incorporating a range of objects, materials and memories encased within boxes designed to be carried (the portable, compact home itself). This was one of many artworks created by Obaidi to explore and commemorate a lifetime of instability and exile, while other works confronted a more direct manifestation of injustice in the form of racism and notions of ‘whiteness’ and assimilation, for example in ‘How Not to Look Like a Terrorist’ (2010) and the connected installation, ‘Fair Skies’ (2010). He also directly explored the impact of decades of war on Iraq in projects such as ‘Uranium Generation’ (2020) and his extensive work on the Abu Ghraib Prison. In his 2015 painting ‘Remains of a Ravaged City’, we can also see links to this latest body of work, with a destroyed, dark landscape obscured and interrupted with violent black lines imprisoning the viewer in the remnants of what was once a land, a community, and a home.
  • Obaidi’s thorough reflections on his own life and the violence and loss faced by him and his country have enabled...

    Obaidi’s thorough reflections on his own life and the violence and loss faced by him and his country have enabled him to also look beyond it, to respond and commiserate and find commonality in suffering. His identity as an Iraqi in exile never became his sole identity or formed a boundary in his artistic exploration, and he immediately felt connected to the stories of these Indigenous communities. He also began to see parallels between the resistance of institutions to confront horrors inflicted abroad, and their resistance to confronting horrors inflicted at home. Although numerous North American galleries initially approached Obaidi for this project, they soon pulled out, fearful of the difficulties they would face in highlighting genocide and dispossession on land they themselves now occupy. Obaidi took the rejection letters, cut them up, and incorporated them into his work, viewing their hesitancy and dismissal as yet another phase of this ongoing injustice. He does not see creating this work as a brave act or himself as a representative for the oppressed, rather he uses this form of expression as a way to process this injustice, the stories he has heard, and the resonance he feels with them.
  • By obscuring and concealing the violence with heavy lines and distortion, he encourages the viewer to question what they are...

    By obscuring and concealing the violence with heavy lines and distortion, he encourages the viewer to question what they are seeing, and to actively try to look beyond the barriers, grids, fragments and mysterious topography in order for them to partake in this act of inquiry and commemoration alongside him. In this way, the artworks – and this entire ongoing series – are a collective act. Within them we may not see the full devastation, but these deep scars on his canvases resonate with many, from Iraq to Palestine to North America and beyond, who recognise the vicious traces on an occupied landscape they may have once called home, the brutal marks on the body after suffering endless violence, and insidious wounds left on the mind, forever marked by trauma, longing and loss.

     

    Written by Mysa Kafil-Hussain

    2023