Exhibition explores creative links between Iraq and Saudi Arabia

Nearly 70 artists have come together in an ambitious, but brief, exhibition in Riyadh, titled Beneath the Gaze of the Palms, that sets together art from Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Running as part of the Common Grounds festival until December 31, the subject is both straightforward and stubbornly complex: as neighbours, the two countries share profound histories of religion, migration, and trade. But their paths diverged in the 20th century – to put it mildly – and this exhibition looks to artists to find how and where connections might endure.

“There's a commonality between both peoples and both lands,” says the Iraqi-Lebanese curator Tamara Chalabi, who put together the show with Jumana Ghouth from Saudi Arabia. “People change, but the lands remain the same. We wanted to avoid a survey show, or one in chronological order, and instead create an engagement and conversation between the artists.”

The result is a substantial celebration of an exhibition, full of surprises (many of these artists resident in Iraq who do not show on the international circuit), old friends (including several Iraqi modernists and major Saudi creatives), and a light and well-judged removal of the typical frames for seeing each side. Can you take politics – or conflict – out of Iraqi art? And how does Saudi art sit when seen in the wider context of the Middle East?

Artists such as Walid Siti, Muhannad Shono, Adel Abidin and Hiwa K present major installations that reflect on history and change. Siti shows an arched work formed of cylinder seals – a reminder of the beginning of history itself, in the earliest form of writing. Shono’s large-scale installation uses sand mixed with gum Arabic that visitors are invited to walk through, altering – even destroying – the work as they go.

Ayman Yossri Daydban shows an older, saturated blue painting of elongated faces, representing an alter ego that was an important part of his early practice.

“Daydban is Palestinian but he was born and raised in Saudi, and that was difficult for him at times,” says Ghouth. “We chose to reflect on his works about identity. At the same time he was heavily inspired by Iraqi art and artists. He’s very close to Iraqi artist Sadik al Fraiji, who's also in the show. We chose these artists accordingly, with topics, like ‘Land and Water', that we realised were universal.”

Entry to the exhibition is through an enormous mudhif, a soaring reed structure typical to the Iraqi marshes that dates from the Sumerian period onwards. The sturdy, nine-arched structure was made on site by a group of Iraqi artisans who travelled with the reeds from southern Iraq to Riyadh by road.

The effect is immediate, demonstrating that borderlines are ignored in favour of the shared topography of the people. The mudhif whispers a quiet warning too: Saddam Hussein drained the marshes and decimated its indigenous population, rendering once prevalent skills, like that of mudhif-building, now culturally endangered.

Loss and elegy resound in the works here, whether by Iraqi or Saudi artists. So too does the idea of the land as a co-creator, a partner rather than a backdrop in human life and history.

When radio was first launched in Iraq in 1936, the first sound played was that of a nightingale. For decades afterwards, according to the artist Fahar Al-Salih, new radio channels would inaugurate their broadcasts with a nightingale song.

Al-Salih pays tribute to this tradition in a house built out of nightingale cages, each one handmade by a family in Baghdad. The Cage (2024) is a celebration of dualities: the natural and the modern, imprisonment and beauty, silence and sound.

Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, who is Iraqi but now lives in the Netherlands, shows part of his long-running project The River That Was in the South, which tells the story of three generations of migration in his family. The video and suite of striking black-and-white drawings depict his father’s move from the south of Iraq to the slums of Baghdad, leaving behind his family’s way of life, centred for generations on the river they lived next to.

Mohammed Al Faraj strikes a similar tone. His video installation that memorialises his family’s life as farmers in Saudi’s Eastern Province, as their oasis dries out due to climate change.

Asmaa al Issa, born in Basra and living in Canada, re-creates the 1920s-era Baghdad Botanical Gardens in miniature with plants, such as myrrh and pistachio, that have survived from Mesopotamian antiquity. A sound installation re-creates the audio landscape of this site, a memory of an alternative reality of civic ambition.

New discoveries

Chalabi and Ghouth moved away from the recent history that disunites the countries, and organised the show according to seven themes: such as “Identity and Heritage,” “Interior Self” and “Land and Water”. They also did substantial amounts of research into the history of the two art scenes, which are rarely considered together.

In “Pioneers” they juxtapose the moments when modern art first developed in Iraqi and Saudi: the 1950s artists of postcolonial Baghdad, who married ancient and popular Iraqi idioms with abstraction, and that of 1980s Riyadh. The Iraqi heavy-hitters brought together here – Jewad Selim, Kadhim Haydar, Neziha Selim, Hafidh al-Droubi, Faeq Hassan, Mediha Umar – warrant a visit to the show alone.

That important moment in Baghdad spread its influence across the Middle East, and in their research Chalabi and Ghouth discovered that many Iraqi artists taught in Saudi Arabia, such as Hassan Shakir Al Said in the early 1960s, and Khalid al Jadir and Saadi Al Kaabi later in the same decade. Iraqi artists also settled in Saudi.

The section also demonstrates the long-standing migration between the countries. One of the Saudi pioneers, Abdullah Al-Shaikh, was born in Iraq in Al Zubair, an area near Basra that many Najdi tribes moved to in the 1880s. Despite this place of origin – and the fact that he studied under Jewad Selim and Hassan – his identity remained Saudi, and he eventually returned to the kingdom.

The curators’ findings are a reminder how little the subject of this exchange has been studied – and how potentially rich the area is. Even in the course of the show, both came across personal ties to each other’s country: Ghouth’s grandfather advised the major agricultural project of Al Kharj in the 1940s, for which the late King Abdulaziz enlisted the help of Iraqi engineers, and Chalabi’s grandparents hosted King Abdulaziz when he visited Baghdad the following decade.

Research is part of the work of cultural diplomacy: shared histories create connections in the present. The official occasion for the show is the Iraqi-Saudi Common Ground festival, which aims to improve relations between the countries The show is only running for the two weeks of the festival.

More broadly, the commonalities explored here are not only in terms of artists' tone and attitude to history and the land, but are also generated from their roles as citizen-researchers. Many, particularly in Saudi, are conducting their own personal work into their own pasts and the country's different histories of migration, such as Reem Al Nasser, Tara Al Dughaither, and Bashaer Hawsawi. With 69 artists, this look into Iraqi-Saudi connections is a hefty start – and it will probably lead much further, buoyed not by diplomatic interest but by the countries' citizens themselves.

Beneath the Gaze of the Palms runs until December 31 at the Mega Studio, The Boulevard, Riyadh

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