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I remember my mother bringing us
to the British Museum in London.
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My mother's family was from Iraq.
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She brought us immediately
to the Assyrian galleries
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and into the room that had
the Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal.
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There's nothing cooler than being ten years old
and learning that this is the first comic book
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and your people are responsible for it.
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She turned to us and she said,
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"What is it doing here?"
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Which made us keenly aware that
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these museums were not just
these polite reliquaries
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for things that have been
exchanged amongst cultures--
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that these were violently extracted.
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It was a museum, but it was also a crime palace.
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[Michael Rakowitz: Haunting the West]
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"The invisible enemy should not exist" is
this on-going work that I began in 2006.
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In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq,
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eight-thousand-plus artifacts were
looted from the National Museum of Iraq.
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I started to think about what it would mean
for those artifacts to come back as ghosts
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to haunt Western museums.
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This project has unfortunately grown to include
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the archaeological sites that have
been devastated by groups like ISIS.
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This installation is Room F in
the northwest palace of Nimrud.
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When it was destroyed in 2015,
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it was holding two hundred reliefs.
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However, it originally had over
six hundred of these reliefs.
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The majority of those reliefs
were excavated in the mid-1800s
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and then sent to different Western institutions.
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The West assigns value on the
objects from that part of the world
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but it's not at all symmetrical
when you consider the way in which
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there's been this devaluation of the
people that are from those places.
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The reliefs are situated in accordance
with the original architectural footprint.
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What this project seeks to do is
put the viewer into the position
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of an Iraqi inside that palace
the day before ISIS destroyed it,
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and to show how much of their
history they didn't have access to,
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and the gaps that they were forced
to be looking at and looking through.
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These artifacts were also forcibly removed the
way that my family was from my mother's homeland.
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My mother's family left Iraq in 1947
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as the result of the emergence of
nationalist ideologies in the Middle East.
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The Iraqi Jews were kind of
in an impossible situation.
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When they entered the U.S., there must have
been all kinds of pressures to assimilate.
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Their assimilation story was not
one where they gave everything up.
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My grandparents were like the first
installation artists that I ever met.
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The house in Great Neck, Long Island,
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everything that was on the floor was from Iraq.
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Everything this was on the walls was from Iraq.
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And what was coming out of the
kitchen was most definitely from Iraq.
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When I was in my senior year of high school,
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the first Gulf War happened
in front of my brothers and I.
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My mother said to us,
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"Do you know there's no Iraqi
restaurants in New York?"
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What she was pointing out was that Iraqi culture
in the U.S. was not visible beyond oil and war.
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As we were approaching another Iraq war,
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I started a project that I could
collaborate with my mother on.
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That became "Enemy Kitchen."
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My mother distributed our family's recipes
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and I would cook with these different groups.
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--Make a little crater,
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--and then you take a piece of the meat here,
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--put it in the center...
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"Enemy Kitchen" offered some kind
of opposition to the way in which
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the war framed everything
when we spoke about Iraq.
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I always talk about the one that happened
in 2006 with a group of school kids.
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The schools that they were going to
had forbade a lot of the teachers
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from speaking about the war directly in
their classes because so many of them
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were connected to brothers and uncles--
and mothers and fathers--
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who were stationed in Iraq.
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It was so unbelievably violent that
nobody ever thought to ask them
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what they thought of the war.
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Now "Enemy Kitchen" is a food truck
that's staffed by Iraqi chefs.
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The sous chefs and servers
are American combat veterans
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that served in Iraq.
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Those stories are now mobilized.
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The color schemes that my
studio and I have chosen,
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it's a little bit like the
color returning to the body.
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So there's a whole range of different
materials that one sees represented.
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The anise tea bags have created the yellowish
palette for the clothing of this "apkallu."
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This is one of my favorite colors.
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This orange is actually an
orange that I grew up with:
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the outside packaging of an apricot paste.
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It was like the original Fruit Roll-Up.
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If a ghost is going to properly haunt,
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it has to appear differently than the
entity appeared when it was living.
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These reliefs use the packaging
of Middle Eastern food stuffs.
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Because of Homeland Security, for
anything that is coming from Iraq,
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it would be too prohibitive
for somebody to import it.
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A can of date syrup labeled
as being "product of Lebanon"
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is actually processed in the Iraqi capital
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and then it's driven to Lebanon where
it gets sold to the rest of the world.
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The object in the museum holds its value
because it can tell you where it was from.
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The date syrup not being able to
tell you where they were from,
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that was the skin that these
artifacts should have to wear
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when they come back as ghosts.
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There's more than eight thousand
artifacts that are still at large.
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Of those, we've made just a bit over nine hundred.
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This is a project that is going
to outlive me and my studio.
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--Hey!
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--Salaam!
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[ASSISTANT] --How are you?
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[ALL LAUGH]
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[ASSISTANT]
--I prepped some wing spines at my house.
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[RAKOWITZ]
--Oh, that's beautiful, Denise!
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Once the studio went into lockdown
as a result of the pandemic,
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I was very adamant about making sure that
everybody in the studio was going to be okay.
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I wanted them to be able to continue to work.
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The assistants come for a visit every few weeks
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and they pick up more materials.
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--I'm currently working on this funerary bust.
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--I've just started working on an artifact
that was originally from eastern Iraq.
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--This is a figure from Mesopotamia,
specifically from the Khafaje region.
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In this moment where we've lost
the close proximity to one another
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and we're making these lost objects,
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we still have these moments
where we can locate one another
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and feel like we're not alone.
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When I was nominated in 2015 for
the Fourth Plinth project in London,
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ISIS attacked Nineveh and Nimrud.
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The "lamassu" were basically reduced to pebbles.
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I recognized the fact that I was going to
be working in public space on a pedestal--
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that this was the city of London,
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the heart of empire--
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and a very short walk away
brings one to the British Museum,
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that I had visited with my mother decades before,
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where they have several "lamassu."
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The Tate Modern had reached out to me
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about the possibility of them
serving as a custodian for this work.
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I did not want to somehow just repeat these
imperial museums being seen as caretakers.
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I wanted the work to be
shared by an Iraqi museum.
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It kept the problems of where
something belongs alive.
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A diasporic sculpture with wings,
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moving between two places,
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representing the conditions of modern Iraqis,
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where there's no fixed place.
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If we're to have conversations about
what decolonization truly looks like,
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it's accompanied by repair
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and it's accompanied by accountability.
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That work is actually something that's never done.