Sacred Spaces

Sacred Spaces transposes the communal ritual environments of Ashura — the annual Shi‘i commemoration of the Battle of Karbala — into installation art. Working from the devotional spaces that diasporic and Iraqi communities build by hand each year, the project documents and reconstructs the silhouettes, miniature battlefields, processions, and votive architectures through which a community renders memory, mourning, and survival materially present.

Moving between the sacred ritual and the gallery, the work asks what is carried when a living rite is re-created as art: how the labor of community construction, the reconstruction of the battle scene of Karbala, and the choreography of procession hold collective memory across displacement. It is the earliest of Al-Adeeb’s projects, and the seedbed for much of the work that follows — it is the subject of her own writing, including the essays “From Sacred Ritual to Installation Art: A Personal Testimony” and “Migratory Sacred Spaces: (Re)creating Ashura.”