Baghdadi Mem/Wars

The collaborative project between Dena Al-Adeeb and Sama Alshaibi is a video and photography series in three suites: Still/Chaos, Efface/Remain, and Absence/Presence. Its conceptual premise is rooted in displacement and the embodied experiences of women living in war times. Emanating from their lived experiences and personal bodily memory of a lifetime in the trenches of an undying war, Baghdadi Mem/Wars paints the landscape of the artists’ brush with annihilation, erasure, and survival daily practices.

In Still/Chaos, a white-walled room collapses inward around the two bodies; as the walls close in they are forced to interact, and each reacts differently to entrapment — one fights, the other folds inward for safety. In Efface/Remain, a hand records a poem by the Iraqi poet Nazik al-Malaika in chalk while a second hand erases it; when the board is wiped clean, the hand simply begins to write again — an attempt at erasure does not have to be a defeat. In Absence/Presence, two figures are encased within a vast, bleached loneliness; one fills a vessel and empties it after the other’s departing figure — a ceremonial gesture Iraqis recognize as carrying the hope of return.

These performances are also acts of resistance — feats of defiance against the effacements engineered by conquest.

M. Neelika Jayawardane, on Baghdadi Mem/Wars