New Lessons from Gaza

New Lessons from Gaza

By : Reema Salha Fadda

[This talk was given on the closing night of On This Land, a collaborative exhibition between Alserkal Arts Foundation, Barjeel Art Foundation, and the Palestinian Museum. The exhibit ran between 19 November and 26 November 2023 at Concrete in Dubai. Above are a selection of photographs from the exhibit.][1]

I have worked on and written about Palestinian cultural politics for fifteen years.  And yet, over the past fifty days words have felt inconsequential in the face of Israel’s genocide. For nearly two months, live streamed on our screens, Gaza has been turned into a dystopian gallery of images that lay bare the horrors of Israel’s annexationist and annihilationist policy towards Palestinians, their institutions, and their land.  

This of course leaves us with a great deal of anxiety about the future of Palestine. My small intervention today seeks to offer a cultural lens on the current crisis, specifically Israel’s violent process of deculturalisation, in the hope of making some sense of the endless nightmare we are all witnessing.

On this Land exhibition poster. Copyright: Alserkal Arts Foundation.

We have all seen endless horrific images of the unspeakable inhumanity that has been forced on the oppressed, rendering Gaza unliveable: a decaying site of destruction, death, and disease. Collectively, these genocidal images serve as an archive of Israel’s culture of violence and undisguised cruelty that seeks to make Palestine invisible.  By stark contrast, the images that surround us in this gallery represent an archive of survival against displacement, ethnic cleansing, and ongoing colonial erasures. More than just a celebration of Palestinian artists, this exhibition reminds us of the collective love, care, and hope we share for Palestine and its survival. Making our steadfast cultural history visible beyond the expectant images of destruction and despair is an empowering show of solidarity and a reminder of the importance of collective action.   

In fact, the spirit of this exhibition reminds me of a year-long project I worked on that culminated in a cultural festival held in Gaza in May 2012 – an event that was sandwiched between two Israeli aggressions that took place that year.  

The two times I entered Gaza, it was an overwhelming experience in both positive and negative ways. What is most unnerving about being in Gaza is the pervasiveness of Israel’s presence, even if it exists as an absence. From the moment you enter its besieged borders through the Rafah crossing, you soon realize Gaza’s intentional isolation from historic Palestine and the world. In addition to the restrictions of movement and goods, Israel also controls Gaza’s sea and air. You feel this when you look out to the sea at night and see the glaring flood lights that Israel has placed in Gaza’s waters to prevent Palestinian fisherman from accessing their seas. 

Another strategy of psychological warfare used by Israel is the breaking of the sound barrier, causing sonic booms that remind Gaza’s residents in their everyday moments that Israel is in control of their air space. The killing of the four Baker boys by Israeli airstrikes during the 2014 aggression, when they were simply playing football on the beach, remains a stark reminder that Gaza is not merely an “open-air prison,” but an enclosed extermination camp. This reality is what makes the recent images of the occupation forces erecting their flag on Gaza’s shores and singing the national anthem earlier this month even more painful, as it serves as another reminder of the power inequalities and visual dissonance between Palestine and Israel's relationship to public space.

Despite the unavoidable restrictions imposed on the besieged territory, for a brief moment in 2012, our group succeeded in rupturing the cultural siege by bringing in a large group of international cultural practitioners, writers, artists, musicians, and many books. On the closing night, we held a concert in Rashad al Shawa [2], a cultural center that was built in the late 1980s and named after the city’s one-time mayor. Many people turned up to the venue; it was packed full of the young and old, men and women. I will never forget, after singing revolutionary songs together, one woman turned to me and said: “This is the first time in years that I have felt alive.”

It was a sentiment that echoed from students, audiences, and our volunteers throughout the week-long festival. The importance of connecting and gathering with other Palestinians like myself who were born in the diaspora, our Egyptian neighbours, and artists from elsewhere‚ was a reminder of the right to live, not just the right to survive. Of course, in moments of crisis, food, aid, and medical supplies are the most crucial for keeping people alive; but, it is culture and exchange with community that gives people the feeling of being alive.

 The Deculturalization of Gaza


Israel’s recurring strategy of affixing visual terror onto the landscape of Gaza through their ‘mow the lawn’ policy—which has now intensified to razing the enclave—is designed to warn Palestinians of their erasure from the land. As I wrote back in 2014, during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, the images we are seeing today are not a spectacle of exception. Rather, Gaza's scorched earth should be read as a metaphor that lays bare the edifice of Israel's policy: one of inevitable destruction and the denial of an autonomous Palestinian future.

For over 75 years, historic Palestine has been aggressively re-territorialized, and as with Gaza today, de-territorialized. Since the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israeli occupation forces have worked to fragment Palestinian society into separate units that ruin their collective will for national unity. Through advanced militarism, Israel's spatial re-ordering of Palestinian society into Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank, is a physical and cognitive fragmentation that has gone unchallenged by the international community; hence, why our call for freedom across historic Palestine, from the river to the sea, has been absurdly deemed as controversial by Western genocidal apologists.

Arab and Tarzan, Visit Gaza, 2014.

Back in 2014, when Israel was once again imposing disproportionate violence on Gaza, the satirical poster by Gaza duo Arab and Tarzan was released. I wrote about how the reappropriation of this famous tourism poster holds a double irony when thinking about the future of Palestine within the global economy. Unlike Jerusalem, Gaza has no recognizable symbolic skyline for many of us;  the image it brings to mind is warfare, rubble, and underdevelopment. As a redundant city brand, Gaza does not fit the “logic of marketability”[3] that has become a central tenet of neoliberal cultural success in which countries, cities, or regions are able to brand themselves effectively and become key players on the world stage.

Additionally, the artwork shatters the Israeli myth that Gaza could have been “the Singapore of the Middle East” had it not chosen the path of resistance. We see this accusation continue today, with Netanyahu claiming in the Knesset at the start of this genocide that:

They [Hamas] want to return the Middle East to the abyss of the barbaric fanaticism of the Middle Ages, whereas we want to take the Middle East forward to the heights of progress of the 21st century.

This false logic was once again peddled by Hilary Clinton in her recent appearance on the popular American talk show, The View, when she argued that “the Palestinians deserved to have a productive, successful economy in Gaza, [but] Hamas came in and basically destroyed all of that.”

Blaming Gaza for its failure to develop as a tourist site of economic and cultural development is a delusion at best, and completely overlooks Israel's intensified economic, political, and military control over the area for decades. Since 1948, Israeli censors have worked to control Palestinian cities by erasing any form of visual or cultural expression that asserts Palestinian nationalism or that suggests that Palestinians are a nation with a cultural past. For example, one of the first laws Israel enforced following the annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967 was for all cultural and biblical sites to come under Israeli administration. This process of deculturalization sought to historically ground an Israeli connection with the land while simultaneously dislodging a Palestinian one and historical narrative.

Similarly, the ongoing fragmentation of historic Palestine by separation barriers and the archaeological expropriations already undertaken since 1967 work to visually alter the historic landscape to reinforce the Jewish right to the ancient Holy Land.  As such, Israel is better able to safeguard its historical perspective within the political arena, which is why the international community are often willing to accept their securitization narrative at the expense of the Palestinian cultural narrative.

Today, despite the 15,000 plus deaths, and 1.7 million displaced Palestinians in Gaza, the dominant Israeli logic continues to state that Gaza’s destruction is the outcome of the Hamas policy of using civilian infrastructures to house weapons. It argues without evidence that Gaza's civilian population is being used as human-shields. It ignores its now sixteen-year imprisonment of Palestinians in Gaza, and it attempts to dislodge the fate of Gaza from the wider context of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle by applying a false liberalism that frames this current aggression as a democratic war against terror—what pro-Palestinian activists have satirically called “Hamaslighting.” Within this logic, Israel can commit disproportionate violence against an entire population, including its edifying and cultural institutions, by claiming self-defense and its own cultural preservation. 

Alongside the intentional destruction of a healthcare system crucial for Gaza’s survival, in this recent aggression, Israel has destroyed churches, Gaza’s oldest mosque—the Great Omari Mosque, universities and schools, the Orthodox Cultural Centre, Al-Qarara Cultural Museum, and Rafah Museum, which was a self-funded initiative that held school visits for children. (I should add that using cultural centers to host educational workshops on Palestinian cultural history is especially important, as many UNRWA schools run in two daily shifts due to insufficient resources. As such, extra-curricular support is critical for the development of these children’s educational futures.). The wrecking of these cultural and educational sites has lead Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor to describe the latest aggressions as a "campaign against cultural heritage".  These acts of destruction are also occurring across several Palestinian cities, including Tulkarem and Jenin where monuments are being removed.  Such violent acts directed towards the cultural identity of these cities are an affront to Palestinian self-determination.

New Maps, New History


Although 7 October is certainly not the beginning of Gaza’s history, it is an acceleration of Israel’s policy to take Gaza back to the “Middle Ages.” 7 October also gave birth to a cognitive apartheid between those who recognize what is occurring in Gaza as a genocide and those who deny the genocide by unashamedly endorsing Gaza’s annihilation.  


Fearing that the word genocide is becoming mainstreamed amongst those critical of Israel’s actions, last week John Kirby, the White House’s National Security Council’s spokesperson, doing Israeli’s propaganda work, reappropriated the term by calling Hamas a “genocidal terrorist threat,” all the while staying resolutely silent on the massacres of Palestinians.  Similarly, the Harvard Law Review denied publication of a Palestinian academic for stating Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. We are at a stage where labelling genocide is worse than committing genocide.

Enabled by linguistic manipulation, and what UN representative of Palestine, Nada Tarbush, recently called “state-sponsored disinformation," Israel and its allies seek to undermine Palestinians legitimate resistance to occupation by rebranding genocide as a moral fight against “human animals.” This dehumanization of Palestinians has facilitated their collective punishment, mirroring previous genocidal rhetoric toward Jews under Nazi Germany who were referred to as vermin or parasites or the reference to Chinese as Shina Pigs during Japan’s invasion in the 1930s.

In this sense, events since 7 October have also reaffirmed what a lot of Palestinians working in the West have feared all along: our mistrust in democratic representation by Western institutions that work to other, silence, and exclude pro-Palestinian voices from mainstream political discourse. These draconian policies enacted on a political, legal, and educational level are now impacting the so-called liberal art world. Artforum editor, David Valesco, was fired for publishing an open letter that called for a ceasefire; a photography biennale in Germany has been cancelled because the organizer’s social media posts were in support of Palestine; and elsewhere Germany’s policing of pro-Palestinian solidarity has led to the resignation of Documenta’s finding committee. Artists, curators, and cultural administrators are being punished for standing with Palestine. The hope is to intimidate critics of Israel into silence.  This current distortion of representation recently led Anne Boyer, The New York Times poetry editor, to release this powerful statement in response to the “Israeli state’s US-backed war against the people of Gaza:”

Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse. I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies. If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present. 

Boyer’s act of withdrawal is in direct dialogue with what the late Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti identified as the corrosive impact of verbicide; the intentional and deliberate distortion of language to alter truthful representation. In his 2003 essay Verbicide, Barghouti argues that Israel’s verbal and linguistic manipulations can help us understand how genocides happen, but more specifically, how such distortions play a critical role in enabling Israel’s colonial remapping of historic Palestine. As he stated then: 

The pollution of language can get no more blatant than in the term West Bank. West of what? Bank of what? The reference here is to the west bank of the River Jordan, not to eastern Palestine. The west bank of a river is a geographical location--not a country, not a homeland.

The battle for language becomes the battle for the land. The destruction of one leads to the destruction of the other. When Palestine disappears as a word it disappears as a state, as a country and as a homeland…..By a single word they redefine an entire nation and delete history. The Israeli occupation imposes a double, triple, endless redefinition of the Palestinian. Call him militant, outlaw, criminal, terrorist, irrelevant, cancer, cockroach, serpent, virus--the list becomes endless. Be the one who makes the definitions. Define! Classify! Demonize! Misinform! Simplify! Stick on the label! Then send in the tanks!

Can verbicide lead to genocide? Oversimplification… might be, as history teaches us, a recipe for fascism. That's why the rhetoric of them/we and either with us or with evil is not just irresponsible jargon--but an act of war.

Today, we have seen how the oversimplified equation of Gaza=Hamas=justification of genocide has directly resulted in shrinking the already compromised territory of Gaza into an even smaller space. Whereas prior to 7 October Gaza was conceived of in its overcrowded entirety, this recent aggression has drawn an even narrower mental map of the Strip. By establishing a split between North and South Gaza early on, Israel’s deceptive military strategy has resulted in the mass exodus of Palestinians who have been forced to leave their homes by foot: a haunting image that mirrors the expulsion of Palestinians from their cities and villages in 1948. As the genocide intensifies, and civilian infrastructure continues to be aggressively targeted, “North Gaza” has become further fragmented into a network of buildings and domestic spaces, including, but not limited to: Al Shifa hospital, the Indonesian hospital, UNRWA schools, and Jabaliya refugee camp: Areas and institutions that are necessary for human survival, which are being wiped out. On the one hand, it gives the false impression that Israel is specifically targeting strategic sites of terror. However, this false re-mapping of public space is designed to spatially reduce Gaza into an incohesive spatial notion of random buildings, and thus, depersonalize it into a gamified site of war rather than a centuries-old, culturally rich urban center.   

These disorienting fragmentations have been used by several Israeli politicians to crudely justify ethnic cleansing. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said: “I welcome the initiative of the voluntary emigration of Gaza Arabs to countries around the world…This is the right humanitarian solution for the residents of Gaza and the entire region after 75 years of refugees, poverty and danger.” This plan was echoed by the outgoing Israeli ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, who stated that:

Gaza was not a nice place to live before the war, and it will not be nicer place to live after the war, and…the international community should think about options to offer those who want to move out. And we said it should be a symbolic number that every country will take upon itself to help Palestinians there to have a better life. If you want to move to another country, you can do that. I can do the same. Why not to build that option for some of the people in Gaza who want to move out?

Here, ethnic cleansing genocidists are masquerading as humanitarian solutionists.

Deploying the language of concern and advocating for Palestinians’ free movement, so long as it’s away from Palestinian land, presents a cruel irony especially as these borders are impermeable for things like medical supplies, fuel, and aid. Even if these words were not being spoken by members of the Israeli government, the discourse reduces Gaza to a humanitarian crisis and depoliticizes Palestine by robbing its people of their agency and fight for liberation.  Additionally, their words fall in line with the “New Middle East map” Netanyahu raised at the UN merely weeks before the genocide began: an act of blatant cartographic propaganda in which Palestine was completely wiped off the map.

The past fifty days have revealed to us in real time just how quickly Gaza has been re-mapped and re-made in the colonizer’s image. 

New Teachers 


One of the recurring conversations I keep having with friends and colleagues is that whenever we think things cannot get worse, somehow the situation does. There is an even larger existential question tied to this: how do we teach the future generation about truth, validity, and justice when Israel and its allies continue to act with impunity?

The so-called pause does not leave much room for optimism, but I also do not think we should fall into complete despair. Rather, I turn to Palestinian author Emile Habibi’s satirical term “pessoptimism,” which I would translate as something along the lines of: living with hope alongside inescapable despair even, if it seems somewhat absurd.  If I am to be pessoptimistic then, I would direct my focus on the new teachers that we have all collectively relied on during these illogically cruel times. We are all learning from Palestine’s exceptional citizen journalists—Motaz Azaiz, Plestia Alaqa, Hind Khoudary, Bisan Owda, Wael Al-Dahdouh, and others—who have become our guides through this dark period of history. They have educated a new wave of students about the longstanding oppression of Palestinians, hence Israel’s targeting of journalists and ban on international media from entering Gaza.  

What is encouraging is how the conversation has moved well beyond a short-term humanitarian discourse to a long-term view of understanding the cruelty of Israel’s settler colonial project. This shift is evident from the videos and infographics being circulated on Instagram and Tik Tok by content creators who are working to educate people about the corrosive effects of disaster capitalism and Zionism. At the same time, these young people are pushing for anti-colonial futures in extremely intelligent, accessible, and exciting ways without diluting the political urgency of the moment. Of course, this is happening off the back of decades-long work by Palestinian thinkers and activists, global movements like Black Lives Matter, and ongoing discourses around repatriation and indigenous rights. Yet, Palestine has undoubtedly accelerated the call for liberation and freedom from oppression for all, everywhere. 

We are in a moment where Palestine has truly gone global. We can see it in the placards that carry the watermelon—our long-standing symbol of creative resistance against decades of Israeli censorship—now being adopted globally to resist draconian anti-Palestinian laws by Western governments. And given Israel occupies a unique position—in that its settler-colonial project is funded and upheld by a global state community—perhaps it is why the brutality in Palestine today is, as Richard Seymour argues, ‘reverberating globally’ and leading people to recognize that our global oppressions are linked. In this moment, we should not underplay how our old and new Palestinian teachers have driven a new consciousness centred on global justice.  

Amongst all the content that we have consumed, one that resonated with me most was by Palestinian content creator Salma Shawa. In a TikTok video released on the fortieth day of the genocide, she tells the story of a famous Yiddish folk tale called It Could Always be Worse by Margot Zemach. For those of you who have children, you may be aware of the story via Julia Donaldson’s famous adaptation, A Squash and a Squeeze. The story centers on a man who is frustrated by his extremely small living space that he shares with his wife and six kids, leading him to call on a wise Rabbi for a solution. Telling the Rabbi his situation “couldn’t be worse,” he is advised to take in the animals he owns into his living space, which he does, thus making the situation even worse than before. He keeps going back to the Rabbi to complain, and each time the Rabbi responds by telling him to take in more and more animals, until the man can’t take it anymore, and finally tells the Rabbi: “help me, save me, the end of the world has come!…There is no room even to breathe. It’s worse than a nightmare!” Eventually, the Rabbi advises the man to clear his home of his animals, which he does, thereby returning his living situation back to where the story began. The next day, the man ecstatically tells the Rabbi, “you have made life sweet for me. With just my family in the hut, it’s so quiet, so roomy, so peaceful… What a pleasure!” 

When I read the Donaldson version of this story to my toddler many months ago, I read it as a moral tale of appreciation and gratitude. However, after hearing Salma Shawa retell the story from the perspective of her Palestinian teacher, it took on a whole new meaning. As she explains, it is a cautionary tale of power and oppression, namely how those in power can thwart the revolutionary ambitions of the oppressed through coercion and control. Read through this critical lens, the story offers a pertinent lesson for understanding the unspeakable horrors we are witnessing in Gaza today. Not only does Israel’s graphic violence trick us into thinking that life before the genocide was desirable for Palestinians, but it also conceals an insidious violence that seeks to derail the idea of a future free Palestine.  And yet even in their most dire moments, Palestinians refuse to submit to the parameters set by their oppressors: a reminder that Palestine and its lessons will lead the world towards true justice and freedom. 

After the current phase of genocide—whenever it may end—we must never forget that although things have gotten worse than we could have ever imagined, Gaza is still a besieged territory and Palestinians across historic Palestine and in the diaspora continue to be denied access to their land. Even if there is a “pause” in accelerated violence, Israel’s cruel attempts to distort and fracture the land through checkpoints, apartheid walls, slow and accelerated genocide, will continue. As such, in this moment of heightened Palestinian catastrophe, it is more crucial than ever to hold on to the revolutionary ideal: On this land we belong and on this land we will return.



[
1] This talk references excerpts from an essay I published in 2014 titled “The Future of Art in an Age of Militarized De-production: Rethinking Cultural Development in Palestine,” during the height of Operation Cast Lead. Much of what I wrote then sadly remains true so have been included in/ adapted for this talk.

[2] Since delivering this talk it has been reported that Rashad al-Shawa cultural centre has been destroyed by Israeli bombardment: https://twitter.com/AlnaouqA/status/1729546776615567717


[3] Sarikakis, Katherine. 'Cities as Geopolitical Spaces for the Global Governance of Culture in Isar, Yudhushthir Raj and Helmut Anheier ed. Cultures and Globalization Series 5. Cities, Cultural Policy and Governance. SAGE Publications: London, 2012. 

Outside Looking In

City of Mirages: Baghdad 1952-1982. The Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY, 22 February – 5 May 2012.

City of Mirages: Baghdad 1952-1982 is an exhibit of design work produced by world-famous architects and firms for the booming Iraqi capital during the mid-twentieth century. Beginning from the year that the Iraq Development Board was established to channel seventy percent of state oil revenues into modernizing schemes for national development, the exhibit traces a thirty-year timeline of foreign architectural practice in Baghdad.

Pedro Azara of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona and his curatorial team selected thirteen key projects to represent significant aspects of, and pivotal moments in, the history of how modernist and postmodernist architects from outside Iraq planned and imagined Baghdad as a modern city. Over the course of these three decades, state power alternated among five different regimes, all of which played a part in commanding the direction and scope of city making from the top down. With each new government, the broad agenda of urban development shifted somewhat; it is partly due to this volatility that more than half of the projects presented in this exhibit were never realized on the ground.

Thus the title City of Mirages is entirely appropriate, as the image of Baghdad memorialized in the space of the exhibit was only ever a mirage. Together, the elegant arrangements of sketches, renderings, and models on display here reveal a projection of the Iraqi city that oil promised to build, but never did. During the 1950s, many of the master architects that the Development Board commissioned late in their careers to create landmark projects throughout the capital accepted the opportunity with delight, viewing it as an opportunity to leave their signature upon the cradle of civilization.

For several of these star-architects, Orientalist fantasies and modernist doctrines informed their designs well before they ever set foot in Baghdad to examine the site and discuss the requirements of the commissioning board. For example, Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs for an opera house, cultural center, central post office, and memorial on the Tigris River stand as outright evidence of Orientalism’s stranglehold over some designers. Inspired by the epic tales of Alf Layla wa Layla, Wright’s plans for Baghdad’s modern landmarks translate his fantasies of the Orient into a theme-park assemblage of buildings intended to recall ancient ziggurats and genie’s lamps.[1] For many, it is no wonder that these particular designs were never realized.

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[Frank Lloyd Wright, Plan for Greater Baghdad, 1957. Image via Wikipedia.]

Modernist architects like Josep Lluis Sert, Le Corbusier, and Gio Ponti approached the challenge of designing for Baghdad with relatively less whimsy. Rather, each reproduced his own signature style in their building designs, the originals of which can be located in other cities across the globe, from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Chandigarh, India to Milan, Italy.[2] Construction of Sert’s US Embassy was completed, and Gio Ponti’s Ministry of Development well under way, prior to the July 14 Revolution of 1958, which replaced the regime of Nuri Al Said and Iraq’s monarchy with a new republic under President Abdul Karim Qasim.

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[Gio Ponti, Ministry of Planning under construction, Baghdad, 1958. Image courtesy of Dr. Khaled Al-Sultany.]

On the other hand, Le Corbusier’s design for an Olympic stadium and sports complex remained just a stack of papers for many years after the architect passed away. It was not until Iraq’s Ba’athist government decided to partially realize his design (the last completed in Le Corbusier’s prolific career) that the building was constructed and opened as the Saddam Hussein Gymnasium in 1980.[3]

\"\" \"\"[Left: Le Corbusier, Saddam Hussein Gymnasium, Baghdad, 1980. Image courtesy of Pedro Azara.
Right: Model of Le Corbusier’s Olympic Stadium, City of Mirages Exhibit, 2012. Image by Mona Damluji.]

Constantinos Doxiadis and Walter Gropius tackled some of the more difficult social and urban problems in Baghdad to develop modernist plans for a housing scheme and central university campus, respectively. These designs adhered to the classic brutalist aesthetics of bare concrete and brise soleil reproduced around the globe; however, the scope and scale of their projects required more research on their parts than architects commissioned for stand-alone buildings. Doxiadis Associates and The Architects Collaborative (TAC) went further than most of their contemporaries to analyze and address the specificities and demands of the local context, though certainly there were problematic aspects of their work that could arguably be traced to undergirding Orientalist assumptions and modernist simplifications.[4] Unlike the other Development Board commissions, construction on these projects continued to some extent under Qasim’s republic, resulting in the partial completion of the modernist visions for Baghdad. Today, TAC’s university tower still rises above the Al-Jadriya campus, while Doxiadis’ housing blocks are subsumed by the dense growth of Sadr City.

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[Doxiadis Associates, Housing Program for Iraq, 1955. Image courtesy of Pedro Azara.]

Perhaps the foil to the City of Mirages presented here is the grand portfolio of work by modern Iraqi architects: the buildings that stand as the true architectural spectacles in the lived city. In conversation with the craftsmanship of Baghdad’s ustas (master builders) and inspired by the possibilities of reinforced steel construction, Rifat Chadirji, Mohammad Makiya, Hisham Munir, and many others inscribed the city with their unique visions in brick and concrete.[5] For readers interested in pursuing these issues further, Dr. Ghada Al-Siliq (University of Baghdad) will be giving a lecture on May 1st titled "Architecture in Baghdad, Then and Now" at the Center for Architecture.

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[Rifat Chadirji, Central Post Office, Baghdad, 1976. Source: Aga Khan Award for Architecture, archnet.org.]

One of the most remarkable aspects of the exhibit is the work that architecture students at the University of Baghdad and School of Architecture of Barcelona put into the material construction of the imagined schemes, that is, the making of the marvelous models featured throughout the exhibit. Seen in three-dimensions, the architectural landmarks of Baghdad (even those never built) stimulate the viewer’s imagination. Dr. Ghada Al-Siliq of the University of Baghdad, along with colleagues Saad M. Hmoud and Bilal Samir Ali, assembled a team of twelve Iraqi architecture students to produce the spectacular centerpiece: a sprawling model of the entire city, illuminating the location and urban context of the many projects seen throughout the exhibit. Flanking the large site model are two video screens juxtaposing looped sequences of archival images of the remembered and the contemporary city.

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[Dr. Ghada Al-Siliq and architecture students at University of Baghdad building the model of Baghdad
for City of Mirages Exhibit, Baghdad, 2008. Image courtesy of Dr. Ghada Al-Siliq.]

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[Model of TAC Baghdad University buildings, City of Mirages Exhibit, 2012. Image by Mona Damluji.]

Today, the constructed building projects featured in the exhibit have suffered in some ways from the US invasion in 2003 and nine years of ongoing violence under occupation. The exhibit gestures towards the “deteriorating” conditions of Baghdad’s built environment in a passage at the entry and the montage of recent images from the city; however, the curators have not gone so far as to document the full extent of the damage in detail. This is the work of dedicated architectural historians at the University of Baghdad and elsewhere, who courageously traverse the city in order to capture and record what is possible.[6] In 2004, UNESCO and the Politecnico University in Milan initiated a cultural heritage project to rehabilitate Gio Ponti’s Ministry building, which was badly damaged in the post-invasion looting; yet such spectacular gestures towards international reconstruction projects can distract from the real damage wrought by the ongoing violence. Countless homes, schools, hospitals, bridges, and neighborhoods in Iraq have been destroyed, and after all, Baghdad’s cultural heritage is far more than its landmark buildings.

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[Gio Ponti, Ministry of Planning, Baghdad, 2003. Image by Simon Norfolk, “The Ministry of Planning,
Baghdad 19-27 April 2003” from his series "Scenes from a Liberated Baghdad."]

An addendum to the exhibit’s catalogue of pristine projects rendered visible as lines on trace paper is the long narrative of war in Iraq. The deterioration of the quality of life for Iraqis since the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, followed by the first US invasion in 1991 and thirteen subsequent years under UN sanctions, and capped by the ongoing US occupation, is perhaps most visible in the ruined and fragmented built environment.[7] Indeed, the damage of these last four decades manifests itself in every aspect of daily life in Iraq, from compromised health care and personal security, lack of access to essential needs like clean water and housing, lack of provision of basic services like electricity and trash collection, to the unavailability of decent jobs and the fundamental struggle for a sense of personal dignity.

Notes

[1] See J. M. Siry, “Wright`s Baghdad Opera House and Gammage Auditorium: In Search of Regional Modernity,” The Art Bulletin 87:2 (Jun 2005): 265-311, and M. Marefat, “Wright’s Baghdad,” in Frank Lloyd Wright: Europe and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

[2] See S. Mehdi, “Modernism in Baghdad,” City of Mirages: Baghdad 1952-1982 [Exhibition Catalogue] (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 2008): 81-89, and S. Isenstadt, “Faith in a Better Future: Josep Lluis Sert`s American Embassy in Baghdad,” Journal of Architectural Education 50:3 (Feb 1997): 172-188.

[3] See M. Marefat, “Mise au Point for Le Corbusier’s Baghdad Stadium,” Docomomo 41 (September 2009): 30-40.

[4] For a critical analysis of the Doxiadis Associates housing scheme for Iraq, see P. I. Pyla, “Back to the Future: Doxiadis`s Plans for Baghdad,” Journal of Planning History 7:1 (February 2008): 3-19; for a descriptive overview of Gropius & TAC design for Baghdad University, see M. Marefat, “From Bauhaus to Baghdad: The Politics of Building the Total University,” TAARII Newsletter (Fall 2008).

[5] For discussions on Iraqi architects, see M. T. Bernhardsson, “Visions of Iraq: Modernizing the Past in 1950s Baghdad,” in Modernism and the Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008) and H. Nooraddin, “Globalization and the Search for Modern Local Architecture: Learning from Baghdad,” in Planning Middle Eastern Cities: An Urban Kaleidoscope in a Globalizing World (Routledge, 2004); for a well-illustrated chronicle of the work of Baghdad’s craftsmen and the early period of modern building practices in the city, see Caecilia Pieri, Baghdad Arts Deco: Architectural Brickwork 1920-1950 (Cairo and New York: American University of Cairo Press, 2010).

[6] In 1991, the Presidential Administration under Saddam Hussein established the Reconstruction Studies Center at the Department of Engineering, University of Baghdad, in order to conduct and publish research following the US invasion. Dr. Suad Al Azzawi served as director until the center was forced to close in 2003.

[7] See G. M. R. Al-Silq, City of Stories, (Iraqi Cultural Support Association, 2011) and M. Damluji, "Securing Democracy in Iraq: Sectarian Politics and Segregation in Baghdad, 2003-2007," TDSR 21:2 (2010): 71-87.