Michael Rakowitz | (G)Hosting

Okay. In 2008, I spent a great deal of time in Redfern, a largely Aboriginal neighborhood in Sydney, Australia, producing a project that involved Indigenous citizens and organizations from that community for the Biennale. I was struck by the overt racism in the city, the ongoing crimes against and the displacement of Native Australians, now 250 years running. But there was something done as protocol that I felt kept the problems and failures visible and made them present, something I've tried to do in my own work for the past two decades. In Australia, the acknowledgement of country is usually a statement or a speech made by an Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal to show respect to the traditional custodians of the land. I've often believed that the best way to forget someone important is to name a building after them so their name disappears into an address, into the architecture. I'm sure that similar things have been said about the acknowledgement of country. But as an outsider, I was incredibly moved when I heard this preamble spoken at every public speech. I thought about my own context as an American living on Indigenous land taken from its original inhabitants. To live up to my commitment to the citizens of Redfern, I made a promise to myself that I would continue to remind those who had forgotten. Since my return to the U.S., I've begun all my public lectures with this, an acknowledgement of country. We are gathered here in holding this event on the unceded traditional lands of Turtle Island. I myself am speaking to you today from the unceded land of the Kickapoo, Peoria, Potawatomi, Miamiya, and the Oceti Shahoween, the Council of the Seven Fires. I ask you to join me in acknowledging the Indigenous community, their elders, both past and present, as well as future generations. We must also acknowledge that the institution hosting this talk was founded upon exclusions and erasures of many Indigenous peoples, including those on whose land we do our work. This acknowledgement demonstrates a commitment to beginning the process of working to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism on Turtle Island. So we start with a landscape, but this is not just any landscape. What you're seeing before you no longer exists. It's like being able to see the light from a star that died long ago. This is a date farm in Hilla, Iraq, that was destroyed in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Now let's put some people in front of those date palms. My story begins with my mother's family, who were forced to leave Baghdad in 1947, eventually emigrating to New York. This photo shows my grandfather, Nisim bin Ishaq Daoud Betaziz, with his family, so large that they extend beyond the frame provided by the desert oasis backdrop. Beginning in the 1920s, my grandfather owned and operated an import-export company called Davison's & Co. When he moved to the US, so did his company. The company closed in 1963, and my grandfather died in 1975. In August of 2004, I discovered a large red can of date syrup at Zahadi Importing Company on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Zahadi's was one of the stores my grandparents frequented when they first arrived in New York. When I brought the can of date syrup to the cash register, the owner, Charlie Zahadi, said, your mother's going to love this. It's from Baghdad. I looked at the label, which was clearly a marked product of Lebanon, and that's when he told me that the date syrup is processed in the Iraqi capital, put into large plastic vats, and driven over the border into Syria, where it gets packed into unmarked tinplate steel cans. It then crosses the border into Lebanon, gets a label, and is exported to the rest of the world. From 1990 until May 2003, this was one method that Iraqi companies used to circumvent UN sanctions. When I asked why it was still being practiced in August of 2004, more than one year after the sanctions had been dropped, Charlie replied that prohibitive customs and security charges were to blame. Importing products directly from Iraq was just too much of a risk. It would be bad business. So after this impromptu first lesson on importing, I decided to further investigate the history of Iraqi exports beyond oil. The date syrup led me to dates, which were legendary in Iraq. They were renowned as the best in the world, with a yield of over 600 different varieties. In the 1970s, Iraq was the world's chief exporter of dates, and dates accounted for the second largest economy after oil. At its peak in the mid-70s, the Iraqi date industry listed over 30 million date palms in the country. By the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988, this number had been halved to about 16 million. At the end of the 2003 invasion, only 3 million remained. In 2006, I reopened my grandfather's import-export company as a storefront on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, one of the centers of New York's Arab community, as part of a project called Return that endeavored to import Iraqi dates to the U.S. for the first time in over 40 years. The storefront operated from October until the end of December of that year. So, together with Sahadi Fine Foods, whom I was able to get interested in my bad business as good art, I signed a deal with an Iraqi company, Al-Farez, to import one ton of Qastawi dates from the city of Hillah. The dates were to be packed in boxes clearly marked Product of Iraq. When I told Athir, the general manager of Al-Farez, that this would be the first product on U.S. store shelves in over three decades to list Iraq as its country of origin, I added that if he and his company had anything to say to the American consumer, they could say it with the design of the box. And the result was wonderfully crazy. Amid all these swaying date palms and these bunches of dates that seem to be hovering mysteriously in midair, there's an art history lesson. On the top left is a photograph of the Lion of Babylon. The caption reads simply, Babylon Iraq. Genuine Lion. On the lower right, another photo, Ishtar Gate Reconstructed. The original gate was taken by a foreign power, the Germans, in the early 20th century and reconstructed brick by brick in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. That lion still remains. On the right flap, they clearly list Product of Iraq and even go so far as to print the flag. The narrative of the date's ill-fated journey to the U.S. mirrored the plight of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees as they waited in a line of cars that was four days long at the Jordanian border, only to be sent back and forth to Baghdad, then finally Damascus, where the Baghdad-based company determined the dates had spoiled. While ten new boxes of dates were airlifted out of Baghdad and into New York City in December 2006, the overall transaction served as a surrogate for a larger story. The dates ended up being released after three weeks in quarantine, during which time the small parcel underwent inspections from Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, the U.S. FDA, and the USDA. And here it is, a fruit that asked questions and scandalized government bureaucracies from Baghdad to Damascus to Brooklyn. With a store open for three months without the main product, it left a lot of downtime. It was during these quiet moments that my attention was drawn to these labels and packaging of date syrup and day cookies that were product of Iraq but could not say that they were. Like they were victims of xenophobia, a veiled provenance. When you sit with an object long enough, it starts to tell you about itself and what it wants to be. The empty store made me think of other empty spaces, like this emptied out museum. These are images of the National Museum of Iraq after it was looted from the 10th until the 12th of April 2003. And these are images that actually live on the website on the lost treasures of Iraq. I started to research the databases of the items believed to be missing, stolen, destroyed, or of unknown status in the aftermath of the looting. I began to imagine these objects coming back as a ghost. But like any ghost, these objects would have to look different in order to properly haunt. Suddenly I thought of the provenance of the artifact which gave the looted item its value and the veiled provenance of the packaging of the Iraqi date products. And so began the Invisible Enemies Should Not Exist, an ongoing series of sculptures that attempts to articulate life size, the 7,000 plus looted archaeological artifacts taken from the National Museum of Iraq and at other sites or destroyed in the aftermath of the war. Along with a team of assistants, I build these objects from Middle Eastern food packaging and Arab American newspapers found in Chicago and other U.S. cities. Out of refuse and urgent vulnerable materials, these objects could be not rebuilt, but reappeared. And what's interesting here is that we're looking at a votive statue with his hands clasped in prayer. Votive statues constitute a large part of what went missing during the looting. Some archaeologists believe that when people went to the temple, they would leave this offering so that when they left it, it was still there to represent you and pray in your place. So I do often think of these objects as surrogates, as ghosts who represent the lost Iraqis. The idea was not to make replicas, but to think about these things that have disappeared and come back as a spectral presence or a mutant. The size is the same, but its material culture is different. The looting of the museum was the first moment of pathos during the war. It didn't matter whether you were for or against the war. There was a consensus that it was a catastrophe and that this was a loss for the whole of humanity. For me, this was a very angry project in that the collective outrage about lost artifacts did not translate into an outrage about lost lives. And so this is one of those images that you can find on the OI's database. And this is its reappearance. And then this is that database. So it looks the same now as it did in the early 2000s. All these Iraq museum numbers are presented and you click on them and up comes a picture and also the museum number, the provenance information, and the dimensions. And the dimensions are great for me and my team of assistants who I work with to reappear these objects, but then there's also in many cases these views from all sides. So it makes a sculptor's job relatively easy. And each of these objects are then presented with an accession card like it might have in a museum, but I wanted to play with the kind of information that's on that accession card. So what the project does is to replicate all of the information that's in the database, including the museum number, the date, the material of the original, the description, the status. But instead of there being a paragraph on how this object may have been used, there are these different quotes from different people who were involved in either responding to or trying to mitigate the looting of the museum. And it becomes these kinds of fragments of different conversations that are happening across the same table. So in this case, Fiorella Stricka says, the Gulf Wars had the single positive results of awakening international interest for the culture of Mesopotamia. And then you have a quote from someone like Satan's favorite poet, Donald Rumsfeld, who when paired with this vase says, let me say one other thing. The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase. And you see it 20 times and you think, my goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country? And then you have people like Dr. Dani George Yuhanna, who I'll talk about in a little bit, who was the director of the museum at the time of the looting, who talks about in his writing and interviews about how people inside the museum in some cases made a choice that we wouldn't necessarily be thinking about. So he says, this piece has a very nice story. It was taken by two young men during the looting. They took nine very nice pieces to their houses. They came to us after the looting, and they said, don't ask for our names or addresses. We were in the museum at the time of the looting. We felt very sorry because we could not stop anything. Then they decided they would take things and bring them back when it was safe. And they did it. As soon as we had the American soldiers protecting the museum, they brought back the nine pieces. And so there is a suite of drawings that accompany the work when it's shown in a museum context. And the fourth and final drawing of the series is dedicated to Dr. Donnie George, who was, like I said, the director of the museum at the time of the looting. He was also the president of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage. And he was responsible for being able to retrieve about half of the 15,000 artifacts that had gone missing. But his story was incredible. And I read his story in the New York Times in 2006. They did an article on Dr. George about three years after the museum had been looted, and they called him the ghost in the Baghdad Museum. And it's like everything that I put in these drawings were actually derived from this one article written by Roger Cohen. Under Saddam Hussein, Dr. George worked at archaeological sites in order to avoid Ba'ath Party meetings. And what Dr. George explained to me later on was that as an Assyrian Christian, he had to be a member of the Ba'ath Party in order to hold the position that he held in the Iraqi government as the president of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage and as the director of the museum. But he did not agree with the ethos of the political party. And so he would often do what he loved, which is to go and participate directly in the archaeological excavations, which is not something that's very common with directors of museums. And so he would have the excuse to write to Ba'ath Central Command, including people like Saddam Hussein, and say, hey, we just found something incredible in Iskandaria. Sorry, can't come to the meeting. Can't wait for you to see it. Dr. George also sidelined as a drummer in a band called 99%, short for 99% of Excellence, that specialized in covers of Deep Purple and Pink Floyd songs. And this is where I fell in love with the man. He was an artist. And one of the elements that's in the work is a sound piece that accompanies the viewing of the work. It plays as an ambient sound. And it's a cover that I commissioned of Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water, performed by an Arab fusion group called Ayub. And so this is like a little tribute to Dr. George's time in 99%. But also the lyrics of the song have a wonderful, horrible connection to the story about the looting of the museum. So here's a little clip for you. So after receiving a letter with a bullet enclosed from extremists who threatened to harm his family if a ransom was not paid, Dr. George resigned his post, fleeing to Syria in August of 2006. In December 2006, Dr. George arrived with his family in the United States, having accepted a position as a visiting artist in the Department of Anthropology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Ahlan wa sahlan, Dr. George. And so what was wonderful was that in February of 2007, shortly after this exhibition had opened for the first time in New York, I was invited to Mutual where the archaeological community along the East Coast had come out to welcome Dr. George at a Sunday brunch. And the reason for this occasion was to welcome him, but also they realized that when Dr. George fled Iraq, he left behind a library of hundreds of books that were hard to find, some of them irreplaceable. But they all came and they brought doubles of those books. They were able to track down doubles that they gave to Dr. George so that he could populate his new office in Stony Brook with these volumes. And what was interesting in this moment was when I met Dr. George, he was really happy about the exhibition, but the thing that he really wanted to talk about was about the drawing of him as a drummer 99 percent. And he said, how did you get an image of me playing the drums? There's no YouTube videos of 99 percent. There's no MP3s. There's no JPEGs. And so I explained to him that I went online and I found an image of him. Oh, and anyway, the reason also that this was a story was that the art newspaper had been following his trajectory since the looting of the museum, and they ran with this headline called Revealed Donnie George Rockstar. So it was getting around. And so I told him that I went online in order to make the drawing and found a picture of him looking kind of bored at a meeting and then a photograph of this guy. And then through the magic of Photoshop, I was able to make this base image, which I then traced. And he told me that's archaeology too. And I went back to Chicago and a few days later, my gallery in New York, Jane Lombard Gallery, sent me these pictures and they explained that Dr. George was actually coming into the gallery a few days every week and he was spending a long time there. And here he is giving a tour of the artifacts the way that he would have done in his museum in Baghdad before he had to flee. And he also had started to rearrange the objects on the table in accordance with to the way that they should be done properly by a Mesopotamian archaeologist. And I spoke with him later that week, and he told me that he had gotten quite emotional standing in front of the artifacts. And he explained that the colors of the works that I chose were, you know, we're all wrong. These were not the way that these looked when they first were made in earlier Iraqi civilizations. But he said he got the size right. And he said that it felt as though the artifacts, through their size, were right where they should be and exactly as they should be as he stood in front of them. And so it ends up being doubly sad because Dr. George ended up passing away in 2011 from a sudden heart attack, unable to be reunited with the real artifacts. Sorry, I need to quickly skip through these parts. I don't know why this is. Okay. Sorry. Another landscape as backdrop. This one is in London. Another museum is in the background, one that hasn't been emptied out. It's the National Gallery of Art. In front of the museum is Trafalgar Square. Trafalgar Square is a celebration of British imperialism and materialism and militarism and materialism, too. I guess you could say that. Also in Trafalgar Square is the fourth plinth. It's a pedestal that was designed by Sir Charles Barry. I guess you can design really boring things in the U.K. and still be knighted for it. And it was built in 1841 and was intended to hold an equestrian statue of William IV, but it remained empty due to insufficient funds. Since the late 1990s, it has served as a platform for temporary public art commissions. In late 2015, I was nominated to submit a proposal for the fourth plinth. At the time, I was working with my studio assistants to research how we might reappear the Lamassu that stood sentry at the Nurgle Gate of Nineveh from 700 B.C. onward, but was destroyed by Daesh in early 2015. We found out from Dr. Kirsten Neumann at the Oriental Institute that the colossal sculpture was 14 feet in length. When I received the blueprints for the fourth plinth, I found out that it, too, measured 14 feet, and so I thought to myself, what else would I do? These Lamassu are held in the British Museum and were excavated by the British archaeologist Austin Henry Laird in 1849. Thus, my proposal was basically an archaeological magic trick. We have the base for a sculpture that disappears into the ether in 1841, another one that reappears from the plains of Nineveh in 1849, then disappears again in 2015, only to reappear again in 2018. As part of the proposal, the jury asked for details on how the sculpture might be made in a way that can withstand all four seasons. Up until this point, all my work from this series was made using papier-mâché, and I knew I would need to choose a sturdier material. The date syrup just kept coming back as this product that was suffering from xenophobia, in a way. The reasons for using the date syrup cans were myriad. They have these beautiful graphics and strong colors, but I also knew that since they were metal and the labels were printed through metal lithography, they would be able to stand up to the British weather. And so the second house cans made an appearance. And then this, just out of interest, is the most popular brand of date syrup that you can get on Edgware Road in London, Basra Date Syrup. We all know where Basra is. The photograph that's on there is actually a photograph that's used by the Iraqi Date Ministry to illustrate harvesting methods, but then when you look at the label, it says product of Netherlands, and I've never seen a date palm grow in Holland. And so this is the unveiling, and there's the beast. The salvage of date syrup cans in this work makes present the human, economic, and ecological disasters caused by the Iraq wars and their aftermath. But if you look at the ancient Assyrian panels that are held in places like the British Museum, you will see that many of the friezes have date palms in the background with fish in the river, a lush ecology that has been devastated by the war. I became interested in the non-human lives, plants, and animals that can't speak for themselves. It starts to fold in these different aspects, the cultural, human, and natural tragedies. And it's really important for me that this Lamassu is having a conversation with everything else in Trafalgar Square. For instance, the lions at the base of Nelson's Column, which is actually made from melted-down cannons from the HMS Royal George. And so the material culture of the victims of war, they are facing off against the weapons of war. And one thing that I knew about Lamassu from the Assyrian galleries at the Oriental Institute is that it's one of the only places, I think, in the world where you can go behind the Lamassu and actually see the cuneiform inscription that was on the reverse. And these were sculptures that were not sculptures in the round, but were basically these very high wall reliefs. And so the Lamassu were always at a threshold of going from one room into another or upon entry into a city. And so they were plastered against a wall. And so on the obverse was this kind of cuneiform inscription that was not supposed to be seen by our eyes. It was like a communication between the king, the artists building the work, and the divine. And so I knew that mine would be standing not against a wall, but would be visible to everyone. And I remember Yom Kippur 2016, being in synagogue and going back and forth by a text message with Dr. Gene Evans, who found out for the first time, I think, what the cuneiform inscription was on the reverse of the Lamassu from the Nergal Gate of Nineveh. And so here it is. This is the side that actually faces about 75% of Trafalgar Square. And the cuneiform inscription, it can be translated to read Sennacherib, king of Assyria, king of the world, had the inner and outer walls of Nineveh built anew and raised as high as mountains. And what was interesting here was when the jury saw this rendered as a kind of as a model and as drawings, they worried that this was going to be the part that was facing most of Trafalgar Square, and that the fun part that has the rest of the body of this winged bull, you know, would maybe be better if that faced the rest of Trafalgar Square. And I realized that if it was in that position, the Lamassu would not be looking out from where the National Gallery is, but looking like it was walking into yet another British museum. And I said, no ******* way. And so the idea was to really kind of keep it as it is. And so what you first see and what you see for most of the space in Trafalgar Square is this inscription, but that inscription lets you know that this has been torn from where it belongs. It's been reduced to pebbles in Iraq, and it's a little bit like seeing the root of a tooth that's been pulled as opposed to seeing the shiny enamel. And so it communicates its displacement. The reconstruction of the Lamassu, set on the fourth plinth, allows an apparition to haunt Trafalgar Square at a time when we are witnessing a massive migration of people fleeing Iraq and Syria. I see this work as a ghost of the original, as a placeholder for those human lives that cannot be reconstructed, that are still searching for sanctuary. When we look at the Lamassu on the fourth plinth, maybe for the first time in human history, we are all seeing the same ghost. It is a monument and an admonishment. And unlike the many Lamassu kept inside the British Museum, this recreation, or rather reappearance, stands outside with wings raised, looking southeast toward Parliament and toward the Foreign Office where the decision to invade Iraq was made, but also looking past them toward Nineveh, hoping to return in the future. And so after the fourth plinth was built, after the Lamassu in the fourth plinth was built, I started to think about the other large-scale works that had been destroyed by ISIS in 2015. And on the same days that the archaeological site of Nineveh was destroyed, the archaeological site of the Assyrian city of Nimrud, also called Kalku, was destroyed. And these destructions accompanied the atrocities committed against the Assyrian, the Yazidi, the Chaldean people in northern Iraq. And this is a rendering of what these might have looked like when they first appeared. I'm trying really hard not to say antiquity and ancient, because these words are things I'm trying to excise from my own system. They're words that tend to kind of isolate and disconnect these works from the Assyrians who are alive today, the people to which cultural property belongs. So I'm trying to kind of move through with some different kind of language. So in these earlier periods of civilization in what is now northern Iraq. And then this is the Northwest Palace when it was fitted with cans of explosives. And then this is when it was destroyed. So the palace, including the iconic reliefs found throughout the building, were destroyed. But as I researched the Northwest Palace of Nimrud, I realized that its history as an image that's constantly eroding in front of our eyes is one that does not begin and end with ISIS in 2015. So the first room that I reappeared from the Northwest Palace was room N, which was kind of a chamber that went in between different kinds of gathering halls or banquet halls. And so this is the plan, the architectural plan. And so I became interested in making a bit of a return to archaeology in my work and doing something where I wouldn't just reappear the reliefs themselves, but to reappear the architectural footprint. So it becomes like an architecture within an architecture. And what I found out was that as I was looking at all of those things that had been destroyed in 2015 by ISIS, that it had been preceded in the 20th century and even earlier in the mid to late 19th century with these extractions of those reliefs to different collections in the West. And so of the 600 reliefs that were in the Northwest Palace of Nimrud, 400 of them had ended up outside of what is now Iraq. And so what ISIS destroyed were the remaining 200. And so I wanted to recreate the spaces where somebody being in the space would be looking at the same thing that an Iraqi might have seen the day before ISIS destroyed it and to see all the gaps and the fragments that Iraqis have had to look at their history in and the gaps that they have to look through. So this is an example, and this is abiding by one of the theories of the polychromy of the original artifacts or of the original reliefs. And so when they come out of the ground, there are, of course, this polite monochrome that the West loves, but we know that it was painted when it was serving as the palace of Ashurnasirpal II. So here is that recreation of the floor plan to the centimeter. And so you see here that there are certain areas where the heads are missing, and Dr. Gene Evans can speak to this with a little more detail than I can. But when these works were excavated, when Layard excavated these works and after they were then parted from their original place, there were, in some cases, Western collections that were not able to receive a full panel or didn't have money for their shipping. And so they developed this kind of technique of being able to slice off pieces of the gypsum stone. And so you actually end up with these beheadings that have this horrible symmetry with the beheadings that were happening when ISIS destroyed sites like Nimrud and Nineveh. And so this is a quote from Lori Hannant that's on the accession label that accompanies this work. They dismantled the winged bulls known as Lamassu as purposefully as any decapitation they carried out in Mosul or the Syrian city of Raqqa. The beard and male heads of the statues are missing, likely taken to be sold on the black market as ISIS has done with other artifacts. They then wired the entire place with explosives and blew it apart along with the temples of Nabu and the goddess Ishtar. And then you see the Assyrian tree of life in these corners which are actually a date palm. So there's a lot of narrative about the date palm and the date harvesting methods during these times where you see these apkallu, these winged deities that are holding something that looks like a pine cone. Some people believe that they're infantile date spats and what's in these Gucci bags that they're carrying is actually date pollen. Date palms grow in male and female genders and so you have to pollinate the female trees with the pollen from the male. And then this is room F on view at Jane Lombard Gallery in January of 2020. And then this is one of the panels where you can see like nothing was left behind except for the rough stone underneath. And then my assistants, my studio team and I started working on room G. And this was where I got a chance to once again work with Dr. Jean Evans and everyone at the Oriental Institute where they invited me to reunite a reappearance of one of the panels with one of the heads that was taken. We'll just move through these details. I'm sorry, I think I just jumped the gun. Okay, so here it is in situ at the OI. And the panel, the accession card or the accession quote that accompanies this is one from Sheikh Khaled Al-Jabouri who says, maybe we Iraqis felt hurt when we saw our monuments displayed outside of Iraq. We get hurt because it's our civilization. I wasn't as devastated when ISIS destroyed my house, or when they killed some of my relatives because this is life, all of us die. But Nimrud was like a part of our family. This heritage was part of our lives, part of all of Iraq. And at the same time that the work was being shown for the first time at the OI, the rest of room G was opening at the Konstal Malmo in Sweden. And for me, this was a site specific project. It's one of the most beautiful exhibition halls in all of Europe. But what really excited me was that Malmo is actually home to about 12,000 Iraqis who have fled since 2003 during the US led invasion. And Malmo has been used in this really horrible way where there's been this desecration of the way that city appears to any of us. It's been derided by everyone from former President Obama to the right wing European parliamentarian who talk about Malmo as being overrun by violent immigrants. And this is just a completely racist misconception. It's an outright lie. And I felt very lucky to work with the local community. And so room G was a banquet hall. And so here it is reappeared. And you can see just how much of room G was taken when it was first excavated in the 19th century, and how much was left. And when we talk about hosting, and I'm thinking about a banquet hall, and who hosts a banquet hall, one of the incredible things that would happen in Malmo was that the Iraqi Cultural Association that was led by Lina Al Nahar, who is in the photo, basically took over the exhibition hall on the night of the opening. And this was a really transgressive and crucial act, because one of the things that Sandy Hillel, a Palestinian architect who now lives in Sweden, has talked about is who has the right to host. And so when you have these communities that are fleeing from other countries like Iraq, they're often seen as the people that only ever be guests, that can only ever be received, and are not able to do the receiving. And so this inversion of who hosted the opening was one of the most meaningful things to ever happen with this work. And in my belief, it has changed those reliefs forever. And so this is her giving her speech at the opening. And then this is a crowd of hundreds of people that crammed into that banquet hall, Swedes and Iraqis. And before I knew it, musicians had suddenly appeared. And the musicians were wearing these headdresses that were actually Queen Kuwabi's headdress from the Royal Cemetery of Ur, which is kept at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia. And for me, this was like this moment, this wonderful moment of breaking the vitrine, not to damage work, but to actually use it as it had been by their ancestors. And so I want to play for you this moment of the music bouncing off of these reliefs. And and it just brought so much joy to the exhibition. So while I was there, the Iraqi Cultural Association had these banquets. Here you can see the delicious food that's been made here, the Iraqi food, the kebab Mosul, and then the other and another lovely night. And these are photos that were taken by members of the Iraqi community at the Cultural Association. So they have these fantastic, I guess, filters from from TikTok. I don't know what it is. But these are wonderful moments that for me are directly connected to the work. I don't know what filter that is, but I like the mascara effect, some off-kilter ones. And then these images of like these family photos in front of the reliefs as backdrops. This one's interesting. And so when I see images like this, this is that band, I think of images like this. And when I look at these images, I wanted to pair them with a quote from Carolyn Christophe Beccardia, who instead of writing an essay on my work for a monograph, wrote me a letter. And she had some things to say about my work that were like wonderful psychoanalysis that I want to share with you here. And so she says, there is always an original lost object by which people have been disconnected. And your enchanted objects are relational. And so far as they're coming into the world, occurs through their reconnection in an embodied manner by a collective by a collective of people fabricators. And so I wanted to end with where this project is at now. And so I end with this, which is something that I've been doing for the past year, where my works have been on exhibit. And, and these, this is actually something that's being considered by several places very seriously. And so I'm going to withhold the names of any of the pieces that I'm talking about, and any of the museum directors or curators. In winter 2020, I began to wonder how this project could go further and, and acknowledge the continued history of displacement in Iraq, and more than that push towards restitution. In response to an invitation from a major American museum to display some of these panels, I sent the following letter. Dear encyclopedic museum curator, my apologies for being late to reply. When he wrote, I was laid up with the flu. And after a few days of travel, I received some difficult news about my mother's health. The reliefs from room F that you inquired about will be on view at the Nasher Sculpture Center until early May. So it will certainly be possible for the work to be shown at your museum in the context of the Assyrian reliefs during the time you've proposed. But I wonder how we may think more audaciously and provocatively about how to do this. As you know, Daesh's destruction of the Northwest Palace of Nimrud was followed in late 2018 by the auctioning of a relief that was in the possession of the Virginia Theological Seminary. The price paid for this relief, $31 million by an anonymous private collector, was enhanced by the demolition of the palace three years before. And while the money will be used for the admirable purpose of a scholarship at BTS, the auction bolstered further the narrative of Iraq as a site of extraction and speculation. I'm hoping that my work can impact and support efforts to interrupt this cycle. In the past few years, I've been focusing more on institutional responsibility and my commitments as an artist descended from an Iraqi Jewish mother forced to depart her homeland. A desire to return, despite its impossibilities, fuels so much of my practice. A multitude of Iraq's cultural heritage now exists outside of its borders, away from its people, and what remains has been targeted for destruction. But what perishes is not just the monumental reliefs of colossal figures of deities like the Lamassu. It is the communities of people who live alongside them. The DNA of those lives cannot be 3D printed and replaced. That is why I've come to call my works not reconstructions, but reappearances or ghosts of the originals. An imperfect and vulnerable offering that will one day also disappear. Let me say without hesitation that it would be a pleasure to collaborate with you on this project. But in order to do this, I'd like to up the ante and create a more complex agreement. I'd like to gift the museum the entirety of Room F, Section 1, free of charge in exchange for the return of your museum's panel from Room F. Given all that has been destroyed in Iraq and the intersection of that destruction with the West's insatiable appetite for the objects of the East, while not always, if ever, extending that concern to its people, this return of an original would be more than just restitutive. It would be restorative. So much is missed when our conversations around decolonization rest only on questions of repatriation. I liken this to the inadequacy of apology versus accountability. Apology, when uttered, unburdens the person saying it more than it heals the person to whom it was directed. But true accountability is an ongoing repair through discourse and reckoning. It is never finished. Restoration exists as a practice within every museum that I have ever known. In fact, when I visited your museum in January, the director took me to the area where some of the reliefs were being restored. I was so moved to see the backs of the reliefs. In that moment, the Apkallu were like figures in the round. I was seeing the relief as if it had turned its back on me, as if it were walking away, going home. Please understand the absolute sincerity of my proposal here, and please do not perceive this as a vilification of the museum, the work you do, or some unkind purity judgment of the museum's collections. The best one can hope for in doing any kind of work is that it will continue to teach, and that we will be open to learning. We know that museums are important, and at their best they can be based on a mutual curiosity among the world's cultures. But we cannot ignore the cultural traumas caused of the extraction of many of these objects, nor the imperative to break this cycle and restore dignity and humanity to the people that have imparted from their cultural heritage. For a long time, I thought I was making these reappearances to replace what was destroyed in Iraq. I imagined that one day, perhaps, my reappearances might end up in places like Nineveh, Nimrud, Mosul, or Baghdad. Yet, what was destroyed in Iraq was disappeared in part because the West valued it so much. And so I wish to complicate my work even more by acknowledging that a ghost needs to haunt. It is not, however, the Iraqis who need to be haunted. It is us. I thank you for reading this, and hope you and the museum will think seriously with me on this proposal. Sincerely, Michael. Thank you all for being here tonight, and thank you for having me. For over 100 years, the OI has been a leading research center for the study of ancient Middle Eastern civilizations. 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