Art talk BeLonging: Michael Rakowitz
Michael Rakowitz. Photo by John Nguyen, PA Wire. Courtesy of the artist.
Michael Rakowitz (b. 1973, New York, US) is a Chicago-based Iraqi-American artist. He describes his work as an intersection between problem-solving and troublemaking. Known for his installations, sculptures and multimedia projects where he weaves together complex histories, he shines light on the tense relation between the Global West and the Middle East. Rakowitz highlights both the loss of Middle Eastern cultural heritage and the human suffering imposed by war, political upheaval, and foreign occupation. He strives to complicate the current narrative around cultural heritage, ongoing forces of colonization, as well as colonial and postcolonial discourses. He touches upon the fraught relationship between preservation and destruction in modern archaeology and cultural heritage work.
The exhibition BeLonging: Michael Rakowitz and the Mesopotamian Collection explores the notions of belonging and longing, of both people and objects, as they move and are moved from one place to another. Through Rakowitz’s work, which bridges socially, historically, and politically forced gaps between humans and objects, it reflects on migration, displacement, and restitution, on cultural loss and continuity, on art and cultural heritage.
Join us for a conversation between him and the exhibition’s curator, Nino Tadaros, about his way of working with art, the art-project The invisible enemy should not exist (2007-ongoing), and his video-work The Ballad of Special Ops Cody (2017), now shown on the big screen in the school’s atrium.
Rakowitz’s work has been exhibited worldwide, for example at dOCUMENTA (13); P.S.1 MoMA, New York; Kiasma, Helsinki; Victoria & Albert Museum and Tate Modern, London; and many more. In Sweden, his works have previously been shown at Malmö Konsthall, Tensta Konsthall and at Medelhavsmuseet. In 2020, Rakowitz was awarded the 2018–2020 Fourth Plinth commission in London’s Trafalgar Square.
The exhibition BeLonging: Michael Rakowitz and the Mesopotamian Collection is produced in collaboration with Medelhavsmuseet/The National Museums of World Culture
Michael Rakowitz, Dar Al Sulh performance dinner at Malmö Konsthall, 2022. Photo: Adam Lundberg