Art blossoms amid protests
Hollow-cheeked and shivering slightly in jeans he had outgrown, Abdullah stood in an unfinished parking garage, transfixed in front of a mural whose meaning he was eager to decode for a visitor.
“See, the man in the middle, he is asking the security forces, ‘Please don’t shoot us, we have nothing, nothing.’ ” Abdullah said the final word twice for emphasis as he earnestly studied the black-and-white image on the wall.
Drawn in charcoal in a socialist realist style, the mural, more than four metres long, showed a group of men walking forward and carrying their fallen friends. The men depicted were unmistakably labourers, with rough clothes and strained faces.
Abdullah, 18 — a former cleaner in a hospital who asked that his surname not be used because he feared retribution for his involvement in anti-government protests — is now an unofficial art guide to one of the most unlikely galleries imaginable: a 15-storey shell of a structure, known locally by all as the Turkish Restaurant building, that looks over the Tigris River. It is the self-declared stronghold of Iraqis who oppose the country’s current leadership.
Covered on all sides by banners with messages to the government, to the security forces and to the world, the building looks like a ship about to set sail, with the slogans written on white cloth ballooning in the wind. The first five floors have become one of the half-dozen major art venues that have sprung up in Baghdad around the protests as painters have turned walls, stairwells and littered parks into a vast canvas.
How is it that a city where beauty and colour has been largely suppressed for decades by poverty, and by the oppression or indifference of successive governments, suddenly came to be so alive?
“You know, we have many thoughts about Iraq, but no one from the government ever asked us,” said Riad Rahim, 45, an art teacher.
The city’s creative hub is Tahrir Square. Art covers the underpasses that run below it, the green space behind it and the streets leading into it
The paintings, sculptures, photographs and shrines to killed protesters are political art of a kind rarely seen in Iraq, where art has been made for at least 10,000 years. It is as if an entire society is awakening to the sound of its own voice, and to the shape, size and sway of its creative force.
The artistic subjects and styles on view show how much a younger generation of Iraqis has been influenced by the internet, discovering there images that resonate with them and then drawing them with Iraqi touches. Rosie the Riveter has an Iraqi flag on her cheek; Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” has the Turkish Restaurant building in place of a cypress tree.
“We want to send a message to the world that this is our culture, we are educated, we are painters and poets, musicians and sculptors, this is what it means to be Iraqi,” Rahim said.
“Everyone thinks Iraq is all wars and fighting,” he added. > BAGHDAD