'Terrorists Don't Like Art'
A visit to the last active gallery in Baghdad.
BY MELIK KAYLAN
Wednesday, June 13, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
BAGHDAD, Iraq--Among the agonies imposed on Baghdad by tormentors in the guise of self-appointed religious enforcers is the proscription of fun. Novelty, convenience, any kind of post-Quranic ease from hardship infuriates them. Ice cream is an abomination, as is mechanized garbage collection, because such delights didn't exist in the time of the prophet. A story is told that last year, on a road overtaken by jihadis, a DVD purveyor was ordered to close because DVDs didn't exist in the time of the prophet. "Neither did the BMW you drove up in," he responded. "When you come back and tell me again on a camel, then I'll listen." They shot him some days later, for his insolence.
Imagine, therefore, the onus of courage on anyone who dares open an art gallery, let alone keeps it running since January 2006 with 26 shows and as many receptions. Such a place exists: Madarat, the last active gallery in Baghdad, just up a side road next to the Turkish Embassy in the Waziriya district near the city center. Imagine the risks involved for patrons attending an opening--how to get there safely, and then how long to stay en bloc as a provocative target, even how much precious gas to use up for art's sake. We decided to go on a quiet day at the gallery, inconspicuously and with minimal protection, hoping to sneak through town unnoticed. I was accompanied by Karima, a sculptor of ceramics who knew the place. Just to be visible in the back seat of a car with a woman offers provocation enough in many neighborhoods--Karima made the throat-cutting gesture as illustration--so we took a circuitous route to improve our chances.
An hour or so later, we stopped just past the Academy of Fine Art, which, astonishingly, strives to keep its doors open part time. The security provided for Turkish Embassy, a fortified emplacement of soldiers on the street corner, supplies some incidental protection both to the academy and the gallery entrance. "Still," said Madarat's 37-year-old director, Hasan, a sad enthusiast smiling wanly through his dark mustache, "it's a matter of luck--40% determination, 60% luck--that we've escaped trouble here." Hasan, himself a graduate of the academy, paints moody, evocative canvases of interiors and landscapes that hang inside the gallery office.
According to Hasan, they haven't escaped trouble entirely. Several Madarat artists have been killed around Baghdad in sectarian shootings and by car bombs. And nearby, violence peaked just before the surge, with firefights up and down the main street, so he shut down the gallery for two months. The gallery itself, though, remains unscathed in one of the few mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods that endure, though strife still engulfs the backstreets and bullets fly by. The gallery proper, a standard white box space, is hidden away. From the outside, you go first into a little bohemian open-air garden-café with a bar, past a large workmanlike copy of Rembrandt's "Nightwatch" hanging exposed to the elements, and then walk under a vine-bower to go inside--with music playing, it could be in New York's Greenwich Village or London's Camden Town.
The show on display was strikingly good: a dozen or more small-to-life-size rough bronzes, humanoid in appearance, with stumpy legs and stocky torsos elongating upward to a point. Semi-abstract, anthropomorphic, infinitely suggestive, they could pass muster in any top-drawer Western gallery. The prices ranged from $500 to $1,500--modest but a little pricey for Baghdad, it seemed.
"There is no realistic market here," said Hasan, "so artists dictate their prices based simply on cost of materials. Most of our collectors have moved abroad. When they do buy something, because they know the artist already, it usually means we must send works to them. But it's very difficult. Sometimes we sell to foreign buyers in Baghdad. Creating a new market or an image for an artist is now almost impossible. We do have a Web site, which was last updated in April due to problems with the server (www.artiniraq.org). Sometimes a businessman will buy an entire show and take it abroad to sell. But really we keep open because we get financing and everybody volunteers help.
"This sculptor now, for example, his name is Alwan Alwan, casts his own bronzes in his atelier and lets other artists use his place. He worked for a while in the ministry of culture under Saddam, but resigned during the embargo when everyone got poorer but freer."
Madarat is funded in part by a United Nations-related organization and in part by the gallery's parent body--Attitudes Society of Art and Culture, a post-Saddam Iraqi civic association with about 250 members. Only 37 remain in the country. "We are a nonprofit public service," Hasan says, "with many projects. We just try to keep a cultural life alive at all costs."
The gallery serves as a community center with various functions, such as concerts and panel discussions, and does the graphic-design work for civic posters and pamphlets. "Many other areas had galleries before, maybe 20 of them, often approved by Saddam, especially in wealthy Sunni areas," Hassan says. "But such areas are now full of extremists, so they all closed."
A visit to Hasan's friend Salam, one street over, shows how hard the task is. Salam opened his own gallery in 2004 and closed it in fear, in early 2006, after two employees were killed. It hasn't reopened since. "I invested everything," Salam says. The place remains pristine, perfectly curated with sculptures and paintings in several rooms untouched and unshown for eight months. "This street, there's no embassy; the terrorists run around," he says. "I am just a private project. I wait every day. The terrorists don't like art."
Mr. Kaylan writes about culture for The Wall Street Journal.
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