What Lingers in the Artist Mind: Experiments and Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group

As defined by their name, Jamaat Baghdad Lil Fan al-Hadith, the Baghdad Modern Art Group was established to negotiate modern art between Baghdad as a centre of production and the rest of the world. It thus drew from both the history of its location in Baghdad, an Abbasid city that traces its lineage to the ancient civilisations of the Fertile Crescent, and its own age as manifested in modernism. Initiated in 1951 by two of Iraq’s most influential artists, Jewad Selim (1919–61) and Shakir Hassan Al Said (1925–2004), the group grew to engage many of Iraq’s leading visual artists and architects. Its legacy, however, reached beyond its active years and geographical borders, and its teachings continue to impact the Iraqi art scene today. Nevertheless, while the group is known by name, and its manifesto has been translated and published several times in the last decade, to date, no exhibitions or publications have delved deeper into its history.

The exhibition aims to historicise the group, its aesthetics and its legacy through providing visual and textual contexts. It examines the group’s development through the work’s evolution of its two leaders and the contributions of its original members, as well as tracks the changing membership over the collective’s first decade and the attempts at continuity after Selim’s untimely death. It does so through mapping the group’s exhibition history. The exhibition considers the group’s impact on following generations through education and presence in the work of succeeding groups who challenged its philosophies and objectives, such as the New Vision Group and lesser studied ones like al-Mujaddidin (1965). It further investigates relationships between the artists, as colleagues and teachers, which led to the dissemination of their ideas today via the ‘Eighties Generation’ of Iraqi artists, who currently live mostly in diaspora, a further loss to Iraq’s cultural and artistic development.

What Lingers in the Artist Mind considers the effect of wars and instability in Iraq, along with the resultant loss of archives, which has affected our ability to fully reconstruct the group’s history outside of the fragmented narratives offered in Arabic by Al Said and the group’s champion, Palestinian critic Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. Indeed, this exhibition can be read through its navigation of absences and fragmentation as much as through the presentation of artworks and archival material. The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq resulted in massive and at times irreversible cultural damage and institutional dismantling, which has been devastating for the nation of Iraq and its people, and for our purposes, for the visual arts. There are paintings we know were executed but have been lost either through theft or severe damage. Likewise, there are tantalising references to documentation in the existing archival record that have no extant equivalent or have yet to be found. We thus acknowledge their absence and have attempted to represent them in the exhibition.

Lastly, What Lingers in the Artist Mind aims to provide a space for critical inquiry and analysis, which in turn will generate further knowledge and studies about this famous group, ultimately situating it and its members correctly within the history of Iraqi art and global histories of modernism, and open further opportunities for the study of Iraqi modern art.

Reimagined in its third iteration, What Lingers in the Artist Mind draws on the research of the iterations of All Manner of Experiments but through Mathaf’s important and extensive collection of Iraqi art, the exhibition is able to extend the conversation into new historical segues and shifts, thus presenting new stories and further charting the possibilities of enriching the art historical narrative.