Experiments in eden: Mid-century artist voyages into the mesopotamian marshlands

Author's Department

Arts Department

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https://doi.org/10.1386/JCIAW_00043_1

Document Type

Research Article

Publication Title

Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World

Publication Date

3-1-2021

doi

10.1386/JCIAW_00043_1

Abstract

Following the 1958 Revolution, many Iraqi artists were sent abroad to study in foreign art academies and train in the latest methods – especially printmaking. The popularity and necessity of print in transnational decolonial movements lent printing practices a popular edge while enhancing the artwork’s seeming accessibility and reproducibility. As artists navigated the regional contours of transnational modernism while exploring graphic artmaking methods in the 1960s, several turned to the country’s southern wetland landscapes as new sites and creative worlds. This contribution examines a few of these mid-century experiments with the Mesopotamian marshlands in order to explore how these works bloomed in the liquid nature of printmaking while simultaneously proliferating images of the southern marshlands increasingly under threat in rapidly modernizing twentieth-century Iraq.

First Page

121

Last Page

133

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