Hope in the air

"Nothing is easy in Iraq," says the co-curator of the first UK exhibition of contemporary Iraqi art since the end of Desert Storm 19 years ago. But Adalet Garmiany, a British artist of Kurdish-Iraqi origin, has a glint in his eye. "But nothing is impossible, either. I'm very, very proud of what we've achieved." He should be. We meet in the cafe of Manchester's Cornerhouse arts venue, and the soft-spoken Garmiany is barely audible above the excited chatter of people waiting for his guided tour of the exhibition. The excitement is unsurprising. As Garmiany explains, this is in effect the first time since 1991 that security restrictions have been lifted, allowing the most prosaic aspect of an international art show - shipping the work - to take place.

With painting, video work, installation, sculpture and photography, the exhibition is one of the first chances anywhere outside the country itself to get inside the real Iraq, via the eyes of 19 artists living and working there. "The work has an authenticity because of that," says Sarah Perks, the other curator whose research trip to Iraq with Garmiany she describes as "completely mind-blowing".

"When we first discussed this exhibition I was really clear that I didn't want it to be simply about the conflict," she explains. "You can get that from reportage and journalism, and it's far too narrow. So because it's artists' work rather than news reports, people can express their feelings a lot more, be more personal. I mean, The Hurt Locker film might be true to the experience of an American soldier but it simply doesn't reflect what it means to be Iraqi and live there."

That's not to say the wars in Iraq are disregarded in this exhibition. Salam Idwer Yaqoob Al-loos' painted triptych, Baghdad? My City is particularly heartbreaking, charting first the claustrophobia of Saddam Hussein's regime via a conglomeration of tower blocks. In the second painting, a crane teeters over the buildings, suggesting change, renewal and hope. But in the third, the streets below the tower blocks are awash with the blood of continued conflict.

"You can't ignore the conflict because that's how the country is known," says Garmiany. "That's a sad fact. But that doesn't mean the exhibition has to be defined by it. We're trying to prove that there is a positive side to all this. It's about stressing to international audiences that yes, there might be a lack of resources, of infrastructure, of galleries. But despite the problems they face every day, people are still making art."

What's immediately striking is how contemporary the art is. Zana Rasul Mohammed's Memories and War is the kind of installation you might expect to see in any cutting-edge show: a series of books and magazines arranged haphazardly on shelves, providing an intricate insight into a life lived. It's only on closer inspection that the simultaneously troubling and hopeful subtext becomes clear: the shelves are actually old ammunition boxes from Saddam Hussein's genocidal campaign against the Kurdish people, now appropriated for good.

Elsewhere, Hemn Hamed Sharef's video piece Sleep features a man in repose on a piece of nylon sheeting. Every movement he makes is hugely amplified by the material - which would be interesting enough as a comment on how every action has a consequence. But nylon is the material that Kurds fleeing genocide slept in or under as refugees, and thus takes on a new significance. Both Mohammed's and Sharef's works make reference to the Kurdish experience, and the greater part of the exhibition features artists from Iraqi Kurdistan - necessarily so, as the region is relatively safe, with fewer restrictions on movement.

"But in the rest of Iraq, too, you can feel the sense of recovery," says Garmiany, encouraged by developments in the north. "The new art spaces in Sulaymaniyah and Kirkuk are in the beginning stages, but they help show the authorities that all this can work as a force for good." All of which is a far cry from the Saddam era, when most working artists simply reflected the regime's policies with commissioned images of war and victory.

"It was a bit like Soviet Russia in that way," smiles Garmiany. "Seriously though, if you did want to express yourself freely you had to accept that you were risking your life, or you had to leave the country and work in exile. The government would control every single image. So what's happening now is a great thing, there are options and avenues for artists to explore that they never had before. I mean, this is Mesopotamia - it's such a rich culture, after all."

Proof that things are different these days came with an arts festival in Iraq late last year held by Garmiany's ArtRole organisation. The symbolism of the venue - the Red Jail, Saddam's former security building - was almost as important as the work shown. Richard Wilson's world-famous 20:50 installation comprising recycled engine oil took pride of place alongside British, American and Iraqi artists.

"You can't magically make an art scene happen," Garmiany says. "But we're trying, and it's really important that it isn't just a one-way process, that it is a cultural exchange of ideas. We don't have a political agenda at all, this is simply about making Iraq a cultural place again, which can only be a good thing." It is this sense of hope through art that provides Contemporary Art Iraq with its most memorable piece. Jamal Penjweny's series of photographs, Iraq Is Flying, captures a wide variety of people - from soldiers under the Baghdad monument Swords of Qadisiyah to his own wife in front of some decommissioned tanks - in mid-jump, united in a sense of euphoria.

"It's difficult to say if there's a work that sums up the exhibition or Iraqi art," says Perks, as Garmiany gathers together his notes for the tour. "It's too diverse and complex for that. But I love these photographs. There's something so optimistic about them, and because they're taken in places across the country, perhaps, in some small way, they reflect the Iraq we don't see." Contemporary Art Iraq runs until June 20. Visit www.cornerhouse.org or www.artrole.org.