Micheal Rakowitch

Bio-

Iraqi-American artist of Jewish heritage who, for around two decades, has developed a practice that
revolves around the various cultural histories of his native land and its people. Employing modes of
installation and relationist artmaking, he has been working through several series of long-duration
projects to create poignant cultural moments that are fuelled by his memories to bring attention to the
several injustices that had been meted on the people of his native land through the period of and
following the Iraqi War.

Rakowitz grew up living with his family in his grandparents’ house. “They were the first installation
artists I ever met,” he told me. “Their home was an immersive environment. What was on the floor,
what was on the wall, what came out of the stereo, what came out of the kitchen was from Iraq. It
was tinged with a brokenhearted longing.” Although Rakowitz has never been to Iraq—perhaps he
never will go, he told me—the influence of his family’s estrangement is legible in much of his work.
“Michael tries to bring forth something that is dead,” his mother told me. “He converts a discarded
thing into something else—to say, ‘Look, acknowledge us.’

MR- says that he makes situations, objects and encounters

Works site specific

Whitechapel gallery, where his site specific works were presented together for the first time. How
these works work out of context.

Projects abou resuurection.

Remaking of lost histoy connected to communities, actual bodies

“I was trained by artists who were always interested in the quiet, in the counter-monument,”
Rakowitz said.

Rooted in public realm, institutional- object history, art during war- counter cultural
amnesia/erasure

Michael Rakowitz was born in 1973 in Great Neck, NY. The artist draws upon extensive research on
cultural objects and events, in order to weave together complex histories and unlikely symbols in his
sculptures, installations, participatory workshops, films, and architectural interventions. His Iraqi-
Jewish heritage and the damage caused by long conflicts between the West and the Middle East also
serve as important influences for his work. Rakowitz critiques the ongoing forces of colonization,
bringing attention not only to the value of cultural artifacts that have been lost, looted, or destroyed
but also to the people who have suffered from continuing violence. His work asks viewers to
reconsider the relationships between hospitality and hostility, and provenance and expropriation,
and to confront the complicity of cultural institutions and audiences in geopolitical matters.
Artworks

- The invisible enemy should no exist

Long project” contruct object looted from Iraqi muesuem n archealogical sites destroyed by militant
groups like ISIS
14th feet long pillar, 14 feet ling nivenah sculpture/lammasu. Using materials of cultural visibility in
US with arab populatins
Lammasu made using Iraqi date syrup tins, nit others like papier machie. Getting rid of hierarchies by
people. Not exocticising cultures meeting.
Hopes his work become obselte, an optimist, for now creating ghosts

The flesh is yours, the bones are ours, and The invisible enemy should not exist, which completes the
exhibition in Dubai, speak more for histories that are forgotten or made to disappear.
The invisible enemy should not exist series, Rakowitz says, “I try to use materials that keep the
wound alive, that keep the traces of the problems and the failures alive. And I see those materials
that I enlist—the packaging of Middle Eastern foodstuffs and Arabic/English newspapers as a kind of
visible scar. Whereas if you are 3D printing and trying to mimic the gypsum from Mosul, you may be
able to 3D print those artefacts, but you can't 3D print the DNA of the people in Mosul who end up
perishing alongside those artefacts. And for me, there is also a certain kind of dignity in these things
like the packaging of Middle Eastern foodstuffs —in this kind of constant haemorrhaging of
communities in places like Iraq when they end up elsewhere”

This juxtaposition, of mass visual vernacular and the historical monument, might appear irreverent
to some but within its weaves one might excavate a narrative of cultural transmission. 

he book was tied to his most visible public installation: a large sculpture in Trafalgar Square, inspired
by an Iraqi monument built in ancient Nineveh—a gypsum carving of a winged protective spirit,
called a lamassu, which was destroyed by ISIS in 2015. Rakowitz had “reappeared” the lamassu using
the ephemera of exile: cans of Iraqi date syrup in five different brands. To underscore that the
project was as much about the present as about the past, the cookbook included dishes by Juma and
chefs like Yotam Ottolenghi, as well as by Rakowitz’s mother, who was born to Baghdadi Jewish
parents in India. Its title is taken from a Mesopotamian proverb: “A house with a date palm will
never starve.”

As the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko later told me, “Art can set the conditions for different parts of
society to connect, to change their thinking on the site of the work and during the process of making
it. That is expected in Michael’s work. There is something diabolical, in a good sense, about the man.
He is a kind of magician, someone who connects things that should not be connected, someone who
can surprise.”
Lamassu- 4th plint- Ninevah- ISIS destruction 2015, part of project that remakes 7000 artefacts listed
as stolen, unknown, missing- Iraq muesuem looting- US invasion 2003

 decided to make this work that ‘reappeared’ – not reconstructed – the ghosts of the
artefacts looted from the museum using date syrup labels.
Compost of diff history- made out of things read by people of those communities read in present,
gives these works a contemporary life and links to people with their past

Reliefs in room N, Invisible enemy should not exist- pacaking material of food, originated in kitchen
learning to cook- concept of hamud-hallu- sweet and sour/ tension between that flavour- that plavce
is his location of art making and for his viewers he absurdity of minor objects telling a major
story is something I seek out: it creates tension without resolution.

Nimrud’s palace

Here, the decorative friezes in the ninth century BC Northwest Palace of Nimrud, once the
banqueting hall where Assyrian sovereign Ashurnasirpal II received guests, have been reconstructed
using commercial packaging: Moroccan tinned sardines in tomato sauce, Maggi halal chicken soup.
The branded packaging of Al-Kbous Tea, Middle Eastern chewing gum and many other products
sourced from Assyrian grocery shops in Chicago are used to create fields of colour, flowers and
figures. They cross walls and turn corners, recreating the layout of the original rooms

r the city fell to US troops in 2003, and Rakowitz has, since 2007, been trying to reconstruct them all.
He calls these objects “ghosts or apparitions”. A selection stand on a big trestle table, all remade
using glued newspaper and cardboard, the ubiquitous date cans and wrappers. All are meticulously
labelled, and appended with remarks and statements. It is sad and funny, horribly entertaining, and
leaves one impressed by the ingenuity with which these objects – pots, vases, figures, helmets,
daggers, reliefs, musical instruments, stone cylinder seals, inscribed clay tablets (the first evidence of
writing) and much besides – have been bricolaged and refashioned.

Objects in muesuem tell you of its provenance, but date syrup wouldn’ since it
has been labelled as the product of lebenon, when its actually from Iraq. These
covers for MR become skin for the reliefs/ghosts of artefacts

Qjestion of ownership:
Enemy kichen- ownership, sadam Hussain plae food. The artefact project is
supposed to outlive him and his studio.
Fourh pillar lammasu, rejected tate cusodianship, gave it to irqai muesuem.
Rep of modern Iraqis, decolonisation- repair and accountability

Enemy Kitchen staff, comprised of Iraqi refugees and American veterans of the Iraq War, outside of Milo’s Pita
Place, an Iraqi restaurant in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood that operates the truck. Most Iraqi restaurants
in the city call themselves Middle Eastern or Mediterranean to protect themselves from jingoistic attacks.
Enemy Kitchen is the city's first Iraqi restaurant to publicly declare itself as such.

The encounter was unplanned, of course, but it was the kind of thing that
Rakowitz, who talks of his art as an ‘open system’, hopes for in his works,
many of which make creative use of public space. ‘Those moments where
people participate allow for the work to go on, beyond my own hands and
beyond my own mind,

orn in Great Neck, New York, in 1973, to parents of European and Iraqi Jewish
backgrounds, he studied graphic arts in the early 1990s, developing particular
interests in sculpture and public art, the latter via a stint at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology’s architecture department. Today, he is a professor of
art theory and practice at Northwestern University near Chicago

Many of Rakowitz’s works draw on his family background – his maternal

grandparents were part of the deeply-rooted community of Baghdadi Jews
largely driven out of the country in the mid 20th century – and his collecting
habits owe more than a little to his childhood passion for baseball cards. But
these personal motivations intertwine with an outward-looking interest in
communities who have been dispossessed or uprooted, and the potential of
public art both to expose trauma and help people find ways of resolving it.

He gathers objects together in a way that allows meaning to accrete, like

layers of silt over time, until something new is born.
Rakowitz intends his projects to be interventions that encourage what he
describes as ‘fearless speaking, fearless listening’

Food, in fact, has been at the heart of a number of Rakowitz’s high-profile

collaborative art projects in the past couple of years. It functions in his work
not only as a marker of history, a register of cultural exchange, and a means
of securing and deepening social bonds, but also—the emphasis on
collaboration notwithstanding—as a site of tension or even antagonism.

tragic episode that made a particularly strong impression on the artist was
the 2003 ransacking of the National Museum of Iraq, whose superb
collection of Mesopotamian antiquities had long been considered one of the
richest of its kind in the world. A mind-boggling fifteen thousand objects
are estimated to have been stolen in the chaotic days following the fall of
Baghdad in April 2003

 This long list of missing artifacts is at the center of The invisible enemy
should not exist, 2007–, which consists of a procession of to-scale replicas
of the objects in question. The replicas, made by Rakowitz and a constantly
evolving team of assistants, are fashioned from Arab newspapers and the
wrappings of stereotypical Middle Eastern foodstuffs (dates, olives,
sardines) instead of the respective treasures’ original alabaster, gold, or
marble, and are exhibited on a simple wooden table alongside labels that
recount each relic’s sorry fate.

When ISIS destroyed ancient stone panels from the Northwest Palace,

in Nimrud, he added those, too: two hundred exquisitely carved wall-
size reliefs. Borrowing a phrase from ancient Babylon, he called the
project “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist.” He has been working
on the “reappearances” for thirteen years.
Rakowitz insists he is not interested in controversy or spectacle but concedes
that his work asks difficult questions. “I think discomfort is important. I
describe the work I’m involved in as a process where problem-solving is also
troublemaking.”

The preservationist struggles with what is to be remembered or saved and what is to be discarded or laid to rest.
At the invitation of Arte In Memoria, buried my archive on the grounds of the Ostia synagogue. The site is
marked simply by the planting of an Iraqi barhi date palm, which draws its nutrients from the soil of the
decaying parchment and papers interred below. It is a way of saying farewell to the things that need to rest,
which is the hardest thing to do when trying to stay alive. 

he flesh is yours, the bones are ours engages with this craft as an opening to larger questions about the
transmission of knowledge and skillsets, and the maintenance of tradition as a resistance against cultural erasure.
New designs representing repressed histories or unwanted memories developed through workshops with Cimbiz
and a group of students from the remaining Armenian community in Istanbul. Together, we constructed molds
from these designs. The original molds have survived largely due to a construction method employing a plaster
aggregate of ground-up animal bone. The new molds were made in the same way, but using the bones of
livestock descended from farms in Anatolya that were owned by Armenians who perished in the genocide
beginning in 1915.

Another component of the project is the dispersal and installation of these architectural motifs from the facades
—the skins—of selected buildings throughout the city, creating a kind of architectural séance, conjuring the
ghosts of citizens forcibly forgotten.

The reconstruction, set on the Fourth Plinth, allows an apparition to haunt Trafalgar Square. Unlike the pair
of Lamassu housed inside the British Museum, the recreation stands outside with wings raised, still performing
his duty as guardian of Iraq’s past and present, hoping to return in the future.