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.