Michael Rakowitz: Haunting the West | Art21 "Extended Play"

I remember my mother bringing us 
to the British Museum in London.

My mother's family was from Iraq.

She brought us immediately 
to the Assyrian galleries

and into the room that had 
the Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal.

There's nothing cooler than being ten years old 
and learning that this is the first comic book

and your people are responsible for it.

She turned to us and she said,

"What is it doing here?"

Which made us keenly aware that

these museums were not just 
these polite reliquaries

for things that have been 
exchanged amongst cultures--

that these were violently extracted.

It was a museum, but it was also a crime palace.

[Michael Rakowitz: Haunting the West]

"The invisible enemy should not exist" is 
this on-going work that I began in 2006.

In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq,

eight-thousand-plus artifacts were 
looted from the National Museum of Iraq.

I started to think about what it would mean 
for those artifacts to come back as ghosts

to haunt Western museums.

This project has unfortunately grown to include

the archaeological sites that have 
been devastated by groups like ISIS.

This installation is Room F in 
the northwest palace of Nimrud.

When it was destroyed in 2015,

it was holding two hundred reliefs.

However, it originally had over 
six hundred of these reliefs.

The majority of those reliefs 
were excavated in the mid-1800s

and then sent to different Western institutions.

The West assigns value on the 
objects from that part of the world

but it's not at all symmetrical 
when you consider the way in which

there's been this devaluation of the 
people that are from those places.

The reliefs are situated in accordance 
with the original architectural footprint.

What this project seeks to do is 
put the viewer into the position

of an Iraqi inside that palace 
the day before ISIS destroyed it,

and to show how much of their 
history they didn't have access to,

and the gaps that they were forced 
to be looking at and looking through.

These artifacts were also forcibly removed the 
way that my family was from my mother's homeland.

My mother's family left Iraq in 1947

as the result of the emergence of 
nationalist ideologies in the Middle East.

The Iraqi Jews were kind of 
in an impossible situation.

When they entered the U.S., there must have 
been all kinds of pressures to assimilate.

Their assimilation story was not 
one where they gave everything up.

My grandparents were like the first 
installation artists that I ever met.

The house in Great Neck, Long Island,

everything that was on the floor was from Iraq.

Everything this was on the walls was from Iraq.

And what was coming out of the 
kitchen was most definitely from Iraq.

When I was in my senior year of high school,

the first Gulf War happened 
in front of my brothers and I.

My mother said to us,

"Do you know there's no Iraqi 
restaurants in New York?"

What she was pointing out was that Iraqi culture 
in the U.S. was not visible beyond oil and war.

As we were approaching another Iraq war,

I started a project that I could 
collaborate with my mother on.

That became "Enemy Kitchen."

My mother distributed our family's recipes

and I would cook with these different groups.

--Make a little crater,

--and then you take a piece of the meat here,

--put it in the center...

"Enemy Kitchen" offered some kind 
of opposition to the way in which

the war framed everything 
when we spoke about Iraq.

I always talk about the one that happened 
in 2006 with a group of school kids.

The schools that they were going to 
had forbade a lot of the teachers

from speaking about the war directly in 
their classes because so many of them

were connected to brothers and uncles--
and mothers and fathers--

who were stationed in Iraq.

It was so unbelievably violent that 
nobody ever thought to ask them

what they thought of the war.

Now "Enemy Kitchen" is a food truck 
that's staffed by Iraqi chefs.

The sous chefs and servers 
are American combat veterans

that served in Iraq.

Those stories are now mobilized.

The color schemes that my 
studio and I have chosen,

it's a little bit like the 
color returning to the body.

So there's a whole range of different 
materials that one sees represented.

The anise tea bags have created the yellowish 
palette for the clothing of this "apkallu."

This is one of my favorite colors.

This orange is actually an 
orange that I grew up with:

the outside packaging of an apricot paste.

It was like the original Fruit Roll-Up.

If a ghost is going to properly haunt,

it has to appear differently than the 
entity appeared when it was living.

These reliefs use the packaging 
of Middle Eastern food stuffs.

Because of Homeland Security, for 
anything that is coming from Iraq,

it would be too prohibitive 
for somebody to import it.

A can of date syrup labeled 
as being "product of Lebanon"

is actually processed in the Iraqi capital

and then it's driven to Lebanon where 
it gets sold to the rest of the world.

The object in the museum holds its value 
because it can tell you where it was from.

The date syrup not being able to 
tell you where they were from,

that was the skin that these 
artifacts should have to wear

when they come back as ghosts.

There's more than eight thousand 
artifacts that are still at large.

Of those, we've made just a bit over nine hundred.

This is a project that is going 
to outlive me and my studio.

--Hey!

--Salaam!

[ASSISTANT] --How are you?

[ALL LAUGH]

[ASSISTANT]
--I prepped some wing spines at my house.

[RAKOWITZ]
--Oh, that's beautiful, Denise!

Once the studio went into lockdown 
as a result of the pandemic,

I was very adamant about making sure that 
everybody in the studio was going to be okay.

I wanted them to be able to continue to work.

The assistants come for a visit every few weeks

and they pick up more materials.

--I'm currently working on this funerary bust.

--I've just started working on an artifact 
that was originally from eastern Iraq.

--This is a figure from Mesopotamia, 
specifically from the Khafaje region.

In this moment where we've lost 
the close proximity to one another

and we're making these lost objects,

we still have these moments 
where we can locate one another

and feel like we're not alone.

When I was nominated in 2015 for 
the Fourth Plinth project in London,

ISIS attacked Nineveh and Nimrud.

The "lamassu" were basically reduced to pebbles.

I recognized the fact that I was going to 
be working in public space on a pedestal--

that this was the city of London,

the heart of empire--

and a very short walk away 
brings one to the British Museum,

that I had visited with my mother decades before,

where they have several "lamassu."

The Tate Modern had reached out to me

about the possibility of them 
serving as a custodian for this work.

I did not want to somehow just repeat these 
imperial museums being seen as caretakers.

I wanted the work to be 
shared by an Iraqi museum.

It kept the problems of where 
something belongs alive.

A diasporic sculpture with wings,

moving between two places,

representing the conditions of modern Iraqis,

where there's no fixed place.

If we're to have conversations about 
what decolonization truly looks like,

it's accompanied by repair

and it's accompanied by accountability.

That work is actually something that's never done.