#iraqi contemporary artist

[totallyhussein-blog]

Art tour highlights creativity in the heart of Iraq

A buzz is building in the Bab al-Sharji neighbourhood in central Baghdad where preparations for an annual contemporary arts festival are underway. The city has long been considered one of the most dangerous in the world but artists in the Tarkib collective want to send a different message – that the capital is alive with creativity and culture.

The event, which began when the collective was founded in 2015, comprises the exhibiting of work in public spaces and a narrative tour of the city called Baghdad Walk. Next month’s four-day Tarkib contemporary arts festival is titled Hello Future!

Members of Tarkib come from a variety of fields including the visual arts, performing arts, music, literature, film, interior design, architecture, graphic design, and photography. A different location is chosen every year for Baghdad Walk, to tell stories of the city from the artists’ perspective.

For their 10th anniversary, Tarkib are revisiting the area where they staged their first festival, as well as showing exhibits at Baghdad’s Museum of Modern Art, which opened in 1962 and was a symbol of the emergent modern Iraqi art at that time.

[antonia-gergely]

Vitamin P - New Perspectives in Painting

Artists I like from the first edition of this book series.

Francis Alÿs

b. 1959 (Antwerp, Belgium)

Best known for Paradox of Praxis I, 1997, where he pushed an ice cube through the streets of Mexico City. Fluxus and the performance art revival of the 1990s comes to mind, but I'd rather focus on his comparatively underrated paintings. 'Francis Alÿs blurs the boundaries between melancholy and humorous story-telling by means of seemingly naive paintings and drawings that form the basis for small animated films addressing socially critical actions and studies relating to everyday life on the streets of his chosen home, Mexico City.' https://www.sammlung-goetz.de/en/exhibitions/francis-alys/

Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis I, 1997 (still)

'Francis Alÿs is best known for his films, installations, and performances called paseos in which he wanders through urban streets. For the past three decades, however, the Mexico City-based, Belgian-born artist has also been quietly painting en plein air, sometimes in extraordinarily remote or conflict-ridden locations. Alÿs completed some of his works when he was embedded in northern Iraq with Kurdish Peshmerga fighters who were driving ISIS out of Mosul.

[Sally] Tallant tells artnet News that Alÿs makes what he calls his “tiny paintings” everywhere he goes, but has never shown them before as an exhibition. Alÿs did, however, include a small preview of this body of work in a powerful video shown in the Iraqi Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale. Called simply (Untitled, Mosul, Iraq, 31 Oct 2016), it showed the hand of the artist attempting to paint a battle going on around him. Later, he wiped all the pigment away.'

from Artnet in 2018 (https://news.artnet.com/art-world/francis-alys-three-decades-paintings-liverpool-biennial-1245461)

Francis Alÿs, Outskirts of Mosul, 2016

'He consistently directs his distinct poetic and imaginative sensibility towards anthropological and geopolitical concerns centred around observations of, and engagements with, everyday life, which he has described as “a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors, or parables”. His multifaceted projects include public actions, installations, video, paintings and drawings.'

'Francis Alÿs presents a selection of postcard-size paintings from the 1980s to today under the title Age Piece. Executed in the tradition of classic plein air painting, these works allude to the condition of global tourism in the contemporary art scene. Many of the paintings were done while scouting new locations for future film projects, often in conflict zones such as Israel and Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq.'

from Liverpool Biennial website (https://www.biennial.com/artists/francis-alys/)

Francis Alÿs, Le Temps du Sommeil. 1996 – present, series of 111 paintings (ongoing). Oil on wood, 11.5cm x 15.5cm

'Accompanied by instructions and postcards which resemble a diary, the work relates in an oblique way to visions of games and exercises seen in many of his actions and films. This series is being shown at IMMA before it travels to Tate Modern, the first stage in an international retrospective of Alÿs’s work.'

IMMA (https://imma.ie/whats-on/francis-alys-le-temps-du-sommeil/)

As I have mentioned, I'm integrating text into my work, and this shows me a very new and bold way to do so. Scrawling, scribbled letters alongside a stamp that would remind anyone who grew up in or before the 2000s of their primary school notebooks or the expiring nature of things like milk sitting in the fridge door. There's something about Alÿs. " My work is a succession of notes and guides. The invention of a language goes together with the invention of a city. "Each of my interventions is another fragment of the story that I am inventing, of the city that I am mapping" quoted in IMMA article.

'Upon entering the room, a seemingly endless sequence of small pieces, alternating between text and paintings, line the walls. The small dimensions require the viewer to approach closely and encourage engagement with the work. Almost all paintings are composed in the same way with a red background and a small, circular setting of olive-coloured grass and a dark green sky where different scenes unfold. Alÿs has compared this technique to the early Renaissance Veduta.  Veduta are detailed paintings or drawings of a town or city where a distant scene was inserted into a landscape.  In later years, however, all artists who employed the Veduta feature were also involved in the painting of Capricci, defined as imaginary scenes, and this would seem an equally appropriate reference for Alÿs’s visions, where figures are repeatedly engaged in seemingly absurd and surreal activities.

While scenes within the green oval are executed with precision, the images also contain splatters of paint and sketchy, white drawings suggesting speedy execution, suited to the  capturing of fleeting thoughts.'

'Rather than serving as an explanatory piece for each painting, the texts accompanying the visual add to our understanding of the narrative. Many of the texts recount journeys undertaken in the past.'

from Paper Visual (https://papervisualart.com/2010/04/20/francis-alys-le-temps-du-sommeilirish-museum-of-modern-art-26-february-23-may-2010/)

I like his visual methods. Very airy, dusty, often warm tones with subtle yet existent brush marks. Representational work, with slight abstracted elements outside of the Veduta feature he alludes to. Magritte comes to mind in his Temps du Sommeil series.

[chasenews]

Monumental Hayder Work Smashes Estimate at Bonhams Modern & Contemporary Middle Eastern Art Sale

London – Al Qamar (1966), an exceptional oil painting by Iraqi artist Kadhim Hayder (1932-1985), was the top lot at Bonhams’ sale of Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art Sale in London yesterday (Wednesday 24 May). It achieved an impressive £635,400 – a new world record at auction for the artist – against a pre-sale estimate of £180,000 – £250,000. The sale also achieved another new world…

[fordarkmornings]

Hayv Kahraman (Iraqi/American, b. 1981)

Hegemony, 2009

[oncanvas]

Fishing, Ahmed Alsoudani, 2018

Acrylic, charcoal, and colored pencil on canvas 76 x 112 in. (193 x 284.5 cm)

[milenaolesinska]

Exposition Art Blog   Rafa al-Nasiri - Artworks

Rafa Nasiri (also al Nasiri) 1940-2013, painter and print maker, was born in Tikrit, a city besides the Tigris 180 km north of Baghdad. Light to him is simply a quality that reveals itself in color, it is quality by itself that goes beyond the things; it is the water that nourishes the work while moving through its veins to elevate the scene into a different levels of existence.”

More

[lucasartres]

Michael Rakowitz. Sabreen - Live in Jerusalem 2010 (The Breakup). 2012.

http://montalvoarts.org/participants/michael_rakowitz/

[timmurleyart]

Voices from the past. 🌞🌝🌗🌗🌑(mixed media on canvas)✨🌟💫

[ein-bleistift-und-radiergummi]

Shaker Hassan Al Saïd ‘Untitled’ 1952.

Shaker Hassan Al Saïd was a founding member of the Baghdad Modern Art Group in 1951, its members championing art that drew upon the country’s heritage, or istilham al-turath. Al Saïd came to be recognised as a pioneer of Iraqi modern art, penning a manifesto that has been described as ‘the true birth of modern art in Iraq’ (Qatar’s Mathaf Museum). 

As a teacher, theorist and historian, Al Saïd was rooted in both past and present, his international outlook resulting in works that were a synthesis of Arab culture and European modernism. A brief period in France introduced the artist to works by Braque, Picasso and Klee, with the flat colour planes and bold contours of the post-Impressionist Cloissonism style also a visible influence in his work.

(Source: christies)

[women-and-arts]

Self-portrait, by Afifa Aleiby, 1982.

Iraqi contemporary painter, born in 1952.

https://www.afifaaleiby.com/

[fordarkmornings]

Hayv Kahraman ( Iraqi/American, b. 1981) 

The Triangle, 2012

[oncanvas]

Insomnia, Ahmed Alsoudani, 2018

Acrylic, charcoal, and colored pencil on canvas 89 x 65 in. (226.1 x 165.1 cm)

[don-lichterman]

Naziha Salim, iconic Iraqi artist, educator & author on Google Doodle

Naziha Salim, iconic Iraqi artist, educator & author on Google Doodle

Google doodle on April 23, 2022, to celebrate Iraqi artist, educator and author, Naziha Salim. She was a painter, professor and one of the most influential artists in Iraq’s contemporary art scene. Her work often depicts rural Iraqi women and peasant life through bold brush strokes and vivid colors. On this day in 2020, Naziha Salim was spotlighted by the Barjeel Art Foundation in their…

[milenaolesinska]

Exposition Art Blog  Rafa al-Nasiri - Artworks

Rafa Nasiri (also al Nasiri) 1940-2013, painter and print maker, was born in Tikrit, a city besides the Tigris 180 km north of Baghdad. Light to him is simply a quality that reveals itself in color, it is quality by itself that goes beyond the things; it is the water that nourishes the work while moving through its veins to elevate the scene into a different levels of existence.” 

More

[lucasartres]

Taraneh Hemami. Absence. 2016.

[open-your-heart-and-your-eyes]

BIPOC PEOPLE IN THE ROCK MUSIC INDUSTRY

Post inspired by, and is an extension of this lovely post about POC emo icons by @rpf-bat. If I get anything wrong, please feel free to correct me. I’m going to try to keep the bios relatively short and sweet so I don’t write an entire essay. All my information was found from Google/Spotify search results or my pre-existing knowledge. Feel free to DM me for specific sources. Fair Use for educational purposes, no copywright infringement intended.

Acrassicauda: Iraqi metal band from Baghdad. Andy Capper and Gabi Sifre wrote Heavy Metal in Baghdad: The Story of Acrassicauda about the band’s formation and their fight to be able to play the music they love.

Booboo Stewart (Vic Lakota from The Relentless in Paradise City and American Satan, Seth Clearwater from The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, Jay from Disney’s Descendants, among many others): Blackfoot, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese.

Tom Morello (Rage Against The Machine, Audioslave, The Nightwatchman): biracial- Kenyan and white (quick side note: Morello has a bachelor’s degree in political science from Harvard, which I thought was really cool).

The HU: Mongolian metal band. They’ve worked with the likes of Jacoby Shaddix of Papa Roach (The Wolf’s Totem), Lzzy Hale of Halestorm (Song of Women), and Danny Case of From Ashes to New (Yuve Yuve Yu).

Jose “The Metal Ambassador” Mangin (radio personality/host and interviewer, Sirius XM): Mexican-American. Is often hosting on Sirius XM Octane and Liquid Metal.

Meet Me @ The Altar: Pop punk trio made up entirely of BIPOC musicians Edith Johnson (Black), Téa Campbell (Black), and Ada Juarez (Latinx). Three of their popular songs are Hit Like a Girl, Feel a Thing, and Garden.

Nandi Bushell: Zulu and white. The twelve year-old drummer has collaborated with Roman Morello, Tom Morello, Jack Black, and Greta Thunberg on Roman’s song The Children Will Rise Up! She has also played with the likes of Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters, Roger Taylor of Queen, Ringo Starr of The Beatles, and Matt Helders of The Arctic Monkeys (and likely more that I’m missing).

Joe Hahn (Linkin Park, Mr. Hahn): Korean-American. The man behind the band’s turntables and keyboard. Linkin Park’s Cure for The Itch on their album Hybrid Theory (2000) specifically highlights Hahn on the turntables within the first minute.

Ayron Jones: African-American. Jones is gaining traction in the scene. Two songs of his I’d like to note are Spinning Circles and Mercy from his 2021 album Child of the State. He has toured with the likes of Shinedown (and makes a hilarious feature in one of the band’s Tiktoks) and will tour with The Pretty Reckless and Black Stone Cherry this year.

BIPOC ICONS

Chuck Berry (The Chuck Berry Trio, Sir John’s Trio) Black. Widely successful, influential singer and guitarist known for Johnny B. Goode, You Can Never Tell, and No Particular Place To Go. Berry’s legacy is still deeply felt in his contemporaries today.

Prince (Prince and The Revolution, “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince,” 3rdeyegirl, Madhouse, 94 East, The Family) Black. Groundbreaking, inventive, and androgynous artist known for hits like When Doves Cry and Purple Rain. Prince has also written songs for others like Sinead O’Connor (Nothing Compares 2 U) and The Bangles (Manic Monday).

Jimi Hendrix (The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Band of Gypsys, Kings of Rhythm, Jimmy James and The Blue Frames): Black and Cherokee. Acknowledged by many to be one of the greatest (if not the greatest) guitarists of all time.

Slash (Guns N’ Roses, Velvet Revolver, Spinal Tap, Road Crew, and entirely too many others to list): biracial- Nigerian and white. He’s the guitarist for Guns N Roses, whose hits include (but are not limited to) Welcome to The Jungle and Sweet Child O’ Mine. He joined his bandmates of Guns N’ Roses Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum in the early 2000s to form Velvet Revolver, recruiting Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots for vocals. He continues to release music, especially with Myles Kennedy of Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators and Alter Bridge (see Driving Rain).

Robert Trujilo (Metallica, Suicidal Tendencies, Mass Mental, Infectious Grooves): Mexican and unspecified Native American descent. Trujilo replaced Jason Newsted as guitarist for Metallica, starting as a full time recording member with St. Anger (2003).

Carlos Santana (Santana): Mexican-born Latinx. A legendary guitarist, Santana’s song Smooth featuring Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas is still an incredibly popular hit to this day. A prolific part of the song is Santana’s guitar work at the beginning of and throughout the song. The riff is considered to rather iconic to rock music as a genre.

Freddie Mercury (Queen): Indian Parsi, born in Zanzibar. Mercury is also considered to be an LGBTQIA+ icon by many. He was a groundbreaking and charismatic performer (not to mention his prolific appearance and fashion). His absolute powerhouse of a voice behind Queen’s innumerable hits like Bohemian Rhapsody, We Will Rock You, and We Are The Champions earned Mercury a deity-like status in both the music industry and pop culture as a whole. He continues to influence and inspire many in the decades since his death.

To all my BIPOC beauties/handsome people:

You exist in this industry. You belong. Do not let anyone in this scene erase or invalidate you.