Tarkib’s Contemporary Arts Festival in Baghdad: Women Artists Play and Perform Memories and New (Hi)stories of Iraq

In the center of Baghdad’s Zawraa Park, Roze Muhammed begins her performance. With a red thread attached to a needle, the young artist sews a line onto a thick piece of cloth in front of her. The thick white cloth hangs between two tall trees by cords attached to its four corners. After sunset, it is illuminated by lights arranged high up on the trees’ branches. Roze and members of the audience walk around its two sides. As Roze stands on one side of the cloth and begins to push the red thread through it, the audience follows her hands and the needle, trying to understand what to do with the hanging cloth. They interrogate Roze with inquisitive glances, eager to know what her artwork is about. She invites them to discover, to take the needle and thread and start to sew with her, each working from their own side and perspective (fig. 1).

A member of the audience takes the needle and pulls it through to the other side of the cloth,while Roze plays lightheartedly with the thread and speaks. “History cannot be written from one side, so the needle passes from one side to another, and only with the presence of another person can I sew the whole history.”¹ With only the silhouette of the other person visible, Roze and the audience participants draw another story on the cloth. They are writing together, sewing their stories into the fabric with only the eyes of the other visible above it,with touch possible only through the cloth itself. From time to time the artist’s eyes encounter the participants, engaging in a dialogue without words, the needle talking for them.

Figure 1.

Roze Muhammed (right) during her performance, with a participant of the festival.

© Alessio Mamo.

Roze is an Iraqi Kurdish artist. Like many of the younger generation of Kurds who grew up after 2003 in the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, she doesn’t speak Arabic, but she always has a translator to enable discussion with audiences after a new story is completed. With the trees holding the whole performance, the public is welcome to play and sew without the artist being there. They can make their own stories. Roze notes that most stories the Baghdad audience is curious about concern Suleymaniyyah, her city of origin. They want to know more about the Kurdish city. They want to cowrite or cosew it. They want to imagine their country, Iraq, to write their new intersected histories. A country that has been divided by decades of dictatorship and war but that the spirit of the new generation wants to reappropriate. This can start here also, in a park, in Tarkib’s Contemporary Arts Festival, with a thread on their hands.

Roze’s performance and artwork, Unseen Link, was displayed at Tarkib’s Contemporary Arts Festival in Baghdad in November 2021. The festival, which changes location every year, took place in Zawraa Park for the first time in 2021. Twenty-two artists participated, among them nine who were also involved in augmented-reality artworks, an interactive exhibition achieved through the use of digital visual elements delivered via mobile phones, in the same park alongside the other artworks. Tarkib is a contemporary art collective, founded in 2015 as an independent artists group, its members coming from different fields: visual arts, performing arts, music, literature, film, interior design, architecture, graphic design, and photography.² In June 2017 a new challenge was taken up as the collective moved into its own permanent home: Bait Tarkib, or Tarkib House. Tarkib House is one of Iraq’s first creative art centers dedicated to contemporary arts and provides Baghdadi youth and women with a safe haven to express their ideas through exhibitions, public performances, trainings, and workshops.

This short article presents a review of the artworks of two female artists, Roze Muhammed and Lanah Haddad, displayed at the Tarkib festival, and a bit of my research about emerging...