The Wake

A charred canvas punctured with small, circular holes. Patches of muddled orange paint seeping to the surface like dried blood. Rows of paper bolstered by wire.

This is “Baghdad Smoke,” Iraqi artist Hana’ Malallah’s haunting abstraction of a land under siege. It’s part of a collection of 17 Iraqi book artists’ work touring the U.S. in an exhibit titled Dafatir, or “notebook”, in Arabic.

Each row of the canvas, which hung like a banner from the ceiling of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA), can also collapse upon the next until it’s a neatly compressed rectangle, small enough to slip into your backpack. With each fold, a wash of orange and black paint engulfs the murals of Baghdad until the city’s inhabitants and culture, buildings and art museums, priceless sculptures and paintings, have been destroyed in a wash of fire and smoke.

The piece represents a vital form in Iraqi art, as ancient as it is modern. Books as art.

Considering the medium, it was fitting that Hana’ joined fellow Iraqi artist Mohammed al-Shammarey at MCBA recently to discuss their creative processes.

A translator converted their speeches from Arabic to English, but more telling than the words was the art. Dominated by images of destruction among Arabic and English text, the works shattered the boundaries of the spoken word to impart the desolation of war.

Both artists, however, deny that their work is political. It’s merely a representation of their lives at particular moments in time. “I am in pain and I am miserable, so my art has to reflect that,” said Mohammed, who spent 10 years in the army living in a two-by-two meter hole.

“I was really forced to express myself,” Mohammed said of his time underground. Three days a month he was allowed to leave and replenish the supplies necessary to turn his earthen home into a painting studio. “It was the beginning of my love story with book arts,” he said, with a good-natured smile.

But the titles of Mohammed’s works belie the grief beneath his apparent sense of humor. “Disaster,” “Globalization,” “Error” and “New War” combine images sketched in black and singed with fire, some of which look authentically battered enough to have been salvaged from the 2003 bombing of the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art.

Today Mohammed has the luxuries of working above ground and with the assistance of Adobe Photoshop. Yet like many Iraqi artists, he has chosen to flee his hometown of Baghdad, where art museums have been diminished to rubble.

For Hana’, however, Baghdad is home. It’s where she heads the Fine Arts Institute’s graphic arts department and lectures for the Academy of Fine Arts, and she refuses to leave.

“Really, I don’t have an option. That’s where I live, and I will continue to live there,” she said. “Destruction never really stops. Crisis prompts the best art.”

In Hana’s case, it also prompts an ability to predict the distance of an exploding bomb. “Burning and destruction is a daily thing for me.”

Dafatir will be on display at MCBA Feb. 17 to March 11.