NEW YORK: With fiery reds and black-oil-stained browns criss-crossed with misshapen ladders, Mohammed Al-Hamadany paints the violence of Baghdad, the battles over power and the shattered innocence.
For the US military it was the 2003 Shock and Awe invasion, but the Iraqi painter ambiguously calls the 25 tall, narrow panels of the time, showing frightened faces in tenement windows and the statue of Saddam Hussein ghoulishly crumpling, the Night of Fire.
With the massive work he has brought the horrific chaos of the invasion, five years later, to the United States, as the centerpiece of a new exhibition of contemporary art from the Middle Eastern country.
Oil on Landscape: Art from Wartime Contemporaries of Baghdad, at the Pomegranate Gallery in New York, would not be here if it were not, with some irony, for a US navy lieutenant who volunteered to go to Iraq and ended up an agent for Hamadany and other Iraqi artists.
Christopher Brownfield was a submariner before he offered to go to Baghdad, where he stumbled across some serious pieces hidden among kitschy pictures of camels in the desert in an art gallery in the Green Zone, the secured US encampment in Baghdad.
Artists were running a shop inside the Green Zone. A man was bringing paintings, most of them were very touristic, Brownfield, 28, told AFP.
But some works were not being shown, contemporary subjects, like children growing up in violence.
He asked about those works, but met a wall of distrust when he sought to contact the artists, who feared being attacked as collaborators by anti-American Iraqis.
They were hesitant to talk to me, a lot was very political, he recalled.Not the typical US soldier – Brownfield studied both nuclear power and literature in university, and has always been a fan of museums – he eventually gained their trust and access to their world.
And he decided he wanted to help them.
These people are the future of Iraqi culture, they rebuild their country s heritage, he said.
My goal was to share their message of the war, to show Iraqi perspective to the US.
He began shipping their paintings to the United States, using the US military mail system. Some of the works he bought for himself, but most he took on consignment, with plans to help the artists sell them.
I sent over a hundred to my mother s house in Michigan, he said.
When he returned to the US in 2007, friends told him of the gallery in New York s SoHo district run by Iraq-born sculptor Oded Halahmy.
Son of a Jewish goldsmith who emigrated in the 1950s, Halahmy studied art in London and moved to New York in the 1970s, where he bought a huge loft.
His own studio for a long time, the grand space is now the Pomegranate Gallery and the office of a foundation to support Middle East artists.
Halahmy himself went to Baghdad in 2004 where he acquired some works, including a series of collages by Qasim Sabti created after the burning of the Iraqi National Library in 2003.
Sabti s works, also in the current show, are composed with tattered fragments of text in Russian, French and English and scraps of ancient book covers.
People must know we have more than oil. We have art, Halahmy said.And the works sell.
We sold about 12 paintings. We have Jewish collectors buying, Muslim people buy directly in Jordan, it s cheaper than in New York, he said.
Shias, Sunni, Kurds, people don t know what is the religion of the artist, each artist here makes what he wants, about peace and dialogue, he said.
After the show closes on June 21, Brownfield, no longer in the navy, plans to travel to Jordan or Syria to turn over the money from sales to the artists in the show.
Then, armed with his experience in Iraq – on which he has written a book – he will head to Bologna, Italy, where he plans to continue his studies. -AFP
